When did Elinor Carucci enter my apartment and take photos of my life? This was exactly how I felt looking at her new book, Midlife, a gorgeous documentary account of domesticity, 20 years in. There is the messy kitchen counter, unpicturesque. There is the couple (at the same counter) paying bills and unpacking groceries, each frame a frozen section of time, implying decades of repetition of household chores.
Dressing for a Wound: How my body and I reconciled after a mastectomy.
How do you dress for your mastectomy? The surgery itself is easy, actually. During the cutting, you’re wearing nothing at all, unconscious and strapped to a table in a martyr’s pose, arms out in a T, while an OR crew that looks like the cast of a reality show bustles around doing God knows what. […]
How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight
In 1972 or 1973, I went to the circus with my friend and afterward her father picked us up. We were 9 or 10 years old, and while we had been enjoying the circus, her father and his new girlfriend had gone to see the porno Deep Throat, which at the time was a groovy thing […]
An Experiment in Empathy
He auctioned off the pistol that killed Trayvon Martin. She watched her child die in a mass shooting. Can they change each other’s minds about guns? On his recent trip to New York, Todd Underwood did not pack a gun. This was unusual, the first time in five years that he went anywhere, even […]
What a Missing Jet Means to a World Where People Rarely Get Lost
Stuff just doesn’t get lost the way it used to. In the old days, which is to say fewer than ten years ago, you might take a wrong turn out of the rental-car lot at a large metropolitan airport and find yourself driving for hours around a sketchy part of town, partially panicked and squinting […]
The Turn-On Switch: Fetish Theory, Post-Freud
Eliot Spitzer, who hopes to be New York City’s next comptroller, likes to screw with his socks on—calf-length black hose, the atavistic shadow of sock garters visible in the mind’s eye. That Spitzer paid for sex is not actually all that interesting. That he brought his nerdish Dudley Do-Right public persona to bed with him […]