"Prescription drugs kill more people a year than traffic accidents – and that doesn’t count traffic accidents caused by prescription drugs” writes Martha Rosenberg, a cartoonist and freelance writer. Her Born with a Junk Food Deficiency follows the grand tradition of American muck-raking, which goes back at least as far as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published in 1906, which exposed the horrors in the slaughterhouses of Chicago: sausage containing rat dung and mould, and workers who fell into vats of lard and were never fully retrieved.

“How did you manage to get hotter with age?” asked a member of Reddit of Molly Ringwald earlier this year. “I drink the blood of Kristen Stewart,” Ringwald typed in reply. You could practically hear the applause.

Ringwald was doing an AMA on Reddit, the most voguish current way to promote an enterprise or identity. For the uninitiated, it stands for “Ask Me Anything,” and is usually preceded by “I Am X,” as in, “IAmA employee for the most contaminated nuclear site in the US AMA” and “I’m Woody Harrelson, AMA,” which was the most awful interaction of baffled film star and enraged audience, a

Women aren’t any less funny than men, but they are more sensitive to environmental cues. Where funny men might share an impressive ability to complete that imitation of a dog in heat or an anesthesia-free bowel resection whether they’re greeted with weak smiles, nervous titters, or visible agitation, funny women are less likely to press the point. This attunement to psychosocial feedback, usually interpreted as a lack of conviction or commitment (or, if you prefer, cojones), might better be greeted as a sign of robust mental health. Still, this perceptual gap in what counts as truly laugh-worthy—which

Thirteen years ago I wrote about Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi’s gritty divorce novel/memoir, and gratuitously (certainly a little too vigorously) contrasted it to the other popular divorce memoir on the shelves then, Breakup by Catherine Texier. Kureishi’s book was raw, impeccable, fearless. Texier’s book was a catharsis, uncouth, a cry of pain. Now that I have some divorce of my own under my belt, I have a clearer understanding of the divergent approaches. Divorce—or rather its particular combination of grief, agony, fear, and shame—is word chaos. It hurls writers back into the primordial ooze.

Think Tokyo and you think bright lights, busy streets, and technology so ubiquitous that you can buy bananas out of a vending machine. And all those things are there. But even though iPads and e-readers are everywhere, Tokyo is still a great city for readers partial to paper and ink. The city’s students and artists contribute to a thriving free-zine scene, and its bookstores stock everything from vintage American magazines to the latest New York Times bestsellers.

Even in Shibuya, the bustling shopping district largely dedicated to the latest technology and cutting-edge fashion, carefully