Reading

After the tragic 2023 passing of Gabe Hudon, a longtime McSweeney’s writer, editor, and friend, Hudson’s mother, Sanchia Semere, endowed a new award in his honor. Annually, McSweeney’s convenes a panel of jurors to select a writer’s second book-length work of fiction that embodies the spirit of humor and generosity that Gabe and his work did. The first-ever winner of the Gabe Hudson Prize was Ayana Mathis for her novel The Unsettled. Gabe was an unflagging champion of writers and books, and one way to honor the memory of Gabe’s unparalleled enthusiasm and encouragement for writers is to celebrate this award, conferred annually on his birthday, September 12.

Dear Marge,

You might have forgotten about the time your husband jeered at you on stage, as you spoke through a miniature wooden version of yourself. It happened in 1996, almost thirty years ago. Let me remind you of the circumstances.

Your son, Bart, started working at a local burlesque house without you knowing. Upon finding out, you convinced the town of Springfield to tear down the risqué business at a town hall meeting—your righteous anger on full display. Right before an angry mob seized the house, the owner, Belle, and her dancers put on an Emmy-winning musical number (“We Put the Spring in Springfield”), which won over the crowd’s hearts, minds, and loins. Unfortunately, you—who showed up late and missed the song because you were renting a bulldozer—remained unconvinced. You tried to put your feelings into song, but you’re not a performer, and no one cared. Then you accidentally drove your bulldozer into the building, requiring you to pay for the damage one amateur ventriloquy show at a time.

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

When an investment tanked and buried us in debt, we had to face the truth of how we’d gotten there

- by Carol Berkower

Read on Psyche

- by James Carmody

Read at Aeon

A dying glacier harbors mysterious species and ecosystems yet to be understood

The post Paradise Lost appeared first on Nautilus.

Some of us might be innate biodiversity detectors

The post Our Gut Feeling About Forests appeared first on Nautilus.

For millennia, artisans have been trying to capture the mystique of the human eye

The post Replacement Windows to the Soul appeared first on Nautilus.

Johnny “Taz” Mulford, who works for a security contractor in Gaza, has tattoos of Crusader-style crosses that have been co-opted by the far right.

The post Team Leader at Gaza Aid Distribution Sites Belongs to Anti-“Jihad” Motorcycle Club, Has Crusader Tattoos appeared first on The Intercept.

Black, 69, was killed by lethal injection in Tennessee for the murder of his girlfriend and her two daughters.

The post “My Client Was Tortured Today” — The Painful Execution of Byron Black appeared first on The Intercept.

There’s a meme I think about all the time: a grainy picture of a huge vertical brush, the kind you see in a drive-through car wash, first stationary and drooping, then spinning and puffed-up. ‘To be a woman is to perform’, it reads — an absurd medium reflecting the absurdity of the feminine act of performance. […]

Long-time viewers of Adam Curtis’s BBC documentaries might see a trailer for Shifty, his new five-part online-only series, and wonder if it is saying anything new. ‘There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move’ reads the caption, and we see Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Stephen Hawking, Ian Curtis, […]

The final defeat of the Spanish Second Republic at the hands of Franco’s Nationalist rebels in 1939, after almost three years of bloody fighting and brutal repression, not only presaged the global conflict into which the world was about to sink, it also set the stage within Spain for what would come after the war. […]

In 1961, at a bus station in Montreal, a young poet was waiting to meet an esteemed writer. The writer’s second novel, published the year before, had gained positive notices from William Burroughs and Norman Mailer. But now he was on the run from a death penalty notice, his heroin prescription having been found in […]

In a contemporary Britain where pubs and clubs are closing at an accelerated rate, politicians are trying to ban band appearances, living costs are curbing consumption, austerity has become not just an economic regime but a way of life. Keir Starmer’s government is constitutionally joyless, his Grey Labour the overseer of austerity and the punisher […]

Here’s a classic early episode of The Simpsons, in which Bart bunks off school to eat ice cream and sneak into the cinema, leaving his hapless school principal to trail him around Springfield. Arriving at the town’s youth club only to find the building empty and derelict, Principal Skinner utters the immortal words: ‘Am I […]

What does life in Britain today feel like? What sensations and sentiments predominate, and how should we characterise them? While it is true that the country is now defined by a deep sense of decline, of conditions getting inexorably worse, there are other prevailing feelings which fit a narrative of decline less well. For many, […]

Come with me on my daily walk with my baby around Grangetown, Cardiff. At the bottom of Clare Road, heading south from Riverside, we pass a former night shelter (abandoned for five years now) obscured by mountains of rubbish dumped into its rotting shell. Further up the road, I recently passed a house in which […]

Over the past four decades, neoliberal economics and globalisation have systematically dismantled the security once afforded to the working class through its own efforts. Through the privatisation of public services, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the outsourcing of what remained, wealth has been funnelled upwards, leaving behind hollowed-out communities reliant on failing public infrastructure and […]

I was outside a museum, in the suburbs of a large capital city. The museum had closed; there were very few shops or cafes nearby, and there was a park on the edge of the museum site. I had a sensation which, as someone with Crohn’s disease, I’m very familiar with — that is, the sudden […]