NONFICTION: ISSUE SIX
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The Nevada Cocktail and the Meadows of AuschwitzCousin Bonnie says that to press a grapefruit of its juice is to skin a cat, is to interrogate the youthfulness of everything pink, is to commune with the lawn ornaments, is to take a gamble. |
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Captivations“I’m not going to get eaten, am I?” My friend Kelley pretends he’s joking, but he folds his arms tightly over his chest. We’re entering The Wild Animal Sanctuary (TWAS), a refuge for exotic animals in Keenesburg, Colorado. |
NONFICTION ARCHIVES
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The Trouble with LookingI’m the only one in the advanced lung disease and transplant center who is not barrel-chested, wearing a mask over my nose and mouth, or carrying an oxygen tank. Many of the patients have emphysema, which gets worse over time and can’t be cured. |
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Membership (as the commercial says) Has Its PrivilegesAlready the person I most wanted to be—the person who in effect would allow me to stop thinking about it—changes shape, changes direction. She is like Achilles: running as fast as he can, going nowhere.
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Submission Bombing (interview)Here at Better, we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how culture, and especially literature, will change as a result of social networking and other online technologies. So when we heard about a group of writers calling themselves “Submission Bombers,” |
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“Just Move Around” (Eddie)TRANSCRIPT FROM THE AUDIO ESSAY: The city of Portland, where I live, is the urban center of a county with more than fifteen thousand homeless people. That figure includes not only people who sleep on the streets and in shelters, but also people who sleep on friends' couches, |
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Widowmaker: How to Get
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Ten Days with an ExorcistAn exorcism works on the body, unlike a confession, which works on the soul and fills it with light. The demon, while it possesses the body, feels whatever the body senses in a given moment. Many spirits leave the body through expiration via the mouth or the nose. |
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GuardianGuy—tall, blond, friendly—knocks on our front door. He carries a clipboard and a glossy brochure. The kids, he says, are getting around phone-line-based security systems like yours. Guy waves his ballpoint in the general direction of a sign, “Protected by Guardian,” half-buried in ivy. |
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Here: On Twitter,
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That You Ever SawOn the morning of my mother’s fortieth birthday, my sisters and I all sat on her bed as she opened our presents. I was ten and still devoted to pajamas, while my oldest sister Katie had taken to sleeping in one of my dad’s enormous shirts, and my other sister Betsy had done the same to emulate Katie. |
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This Human SkinIn 1864, Robert McGee, a child, was scalped by Chief Little Turtle. McGee lived, and grew up with his head scarred like a baseball. Little Turtle left enough hair at the front of his head that a hat would have covered the bald spot and scars. |
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BellThe length of a human baby’s vocal cords is 2–3 millimeters. Babies vibrate them very hard—harder than an adult could without injuring herself—to produce a grating sound, designed like the roar of a lion to generate response. |
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Teach Me TonightIn 1941, the Embassy Music Corporation printed “Tips on Popular Singing by Frank Sinatra,” a short text—little more than a pamphlet, really—by the singer and his coach, John Quinlan. “Everyone can sing a little,” the manual insists, |
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Popular DoughnutsAmong friends and family I am famous for avoiding conflict. Once, when I was pitching in a college baseball game, my catcher signaled that I try to hit the batter as payback for his high-cleat slide that nearly injured our shortstop an inning earlier. I shook off the call. |
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An Interview with Nancy Singleton HachisuLesley Wolff: Japanese Farm Food has become a sensation among food-conscious Americans and proponents of the Slow Food Movement. How does Slow Food differ between Japan and the US? Nancy Singleton Hachisu: When asked what Slow Food means to me, my knee-jerk response is: It’s a group in Italy.
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West Coast LonelinessSnowfall, this is my goodbye to you. Already there is a chip on one of the black-striped bowls I bought at the discount store in the Mission on Friday. I find it comforting. Already it’s worn, already familiar. Already, I broke it. The hallway of my new apartment smells of England.
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Will Help Be Given?[from the audio essay transcript]: Every year they grow a corn maze six miles outside Walla Walla, in eastern Washington, where I live. The signs for the maze begin appearing in mid September, printed in red ink on white boards stuck in the corners of fields like some strange crop that bleeds words.
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PipelinePhilip Seymour Hoffman died with a needle in his arm. Five empty bags of heroin surrounded him. If this were a movie, he would have been the man who had seen too much. In the movie, his mother couldn’t afford a wheelchair so her neighbor carried her around on his back, in exchange for sex. |
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Show Me the Meaning
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