Category: Recommended

Keaton is the chamber-music master of comedy, with the counterpoint clear and unmuddied by extraneous emotion. It may be that our new claustrophobia is mirrored in his old comedy. The hospital has blown away, and that house has fallen on us all.

But it’s important to note that this is not necessarily a natural social phenomenon. Rather it is the direct result of an algorithm developed by profit-seeking companies. “Social media is optimized for the quickest and hottest and most outrageous takes,” Max Stossel, an adviser at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reimagining digital infrastructure, told me. “It’s a process that’s really at odds with accuracy and thoughtfulness.”

It’s understandable that he doesn’t want to get into it, considering the other misconception top of mind tonight. Such as: “The misconception that I’m crazy, which people seem to enjoy, the madman or whatever—to which I simply say you can’t survive 43 years in Hollywood or star in over 120 movies if you’re crazy. You’re not going to get bonded. They’re not going to work with you,” he says.

Industry leaders are blunt about the business model: According to materials for a “boot camp” for aspiring mobile-home park investors prepared by Mobile Home University, which is run by two of the largest mobile-home park owners in the country, “the fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy.”

A friend’s father routinely beats his entire family “until he had punched them all enough to make them listen,” and Crews’s stepfather menaces his family with fists and a twelve-gauge until Crews’s mother finally takes the kids and flees. She tells a crying Crews, cold and tired from walking through the night, to quit wishing that he could go back to his father. “Wish in one hand and shit in the other,” she says. “See which one fills up first.”

when Eggers was about ten, an aging Latvian American painter named Hyman Bloom, who influenced Jackson Pollock and was a friend of Eggers’s parents, gave him two books of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer, fifteenth-century German printmakers. “That is when I almost literally, but certainly metaphorically, put away my comic books and became a snob and a dilettante,” Eggers told me. “The sea creatures and the satyrs and the wild men and the demons did kind of put Marvel to shame, in my eyes.”

Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying.

In this era of mass incarceration, in which we already lock up more of our population than any other nation on Earth,” Stephen Reinhardt, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in 2014, “it is especially curious that the government feels compelled to invent fake crimes and imprison people for long periods of time for agreeing to participate in them

have three children of my own now. When my oldest daughter was eight—near the same age I was when I watched my parents’ parties—she and I drove past a sign, “Spirit Shoppe.” “For a minute,” she said, “I thought we could buy a ghost there.” A sudden dawn. Yes, we could. Ghosts are exactly what we’re buying at the liquor store. Booze is haunted. We drink what’s fermented and distilled. We drink the dead, and, even past the point of dead, something so fermented it lives again in those of us who swallow these spirits.

When I asked Mr. Knope and Mr. Fritts whether they were surprised that truckers had started the protest movement in Ottawa, neither was. “Trucking has been a keg of dynamite waiting to explode for 39 years,” Mr. Fritts said. “I’m surprised it took this long.”