There is a moment of reckoning in every married woman’s life when she looks around and says to herself, “This support position was falsely advertised as an exciting leadership opportunity.” Someone in HR sold her a bill of goods. Happily ever after, she now realizes, is a trick they play on you, to turn your life into a blur of breast pumps and dirty laundry.
Facing the inescapable reality of death is not, generally speaking, good for the economy. The consumer frenzy of capitalism depends on our delaying our big moment of reckoning for as long as possible; once we start to view our property and possessions, our fashions and vehicles and even face-lifts, as temporary investments that won’t hold much value past the grave, a shift in priorities becomes necessary. And thanks to the modern tendency to extend adolescence well into middle age, many of us are only beginning to savor the more lavish spoils of the American dream when orthopedic shoes, blood-sugar monitors,
Sports books have the unfortunate tendency to treat local pockets of fanaticism as if they were universal. That may be unavoidable; when it comes to the suspenseful movement of balls, titillation is almost always in the eye of the beholder.
Authenticity is something we can only imagine these days. In the midst of some deep-relaxation exercise, we might picture small children playing with wooden toys or humble peasants toiling in the fields, but even our inward set pieces feel a little fake. The wooden toys are actually replicas of plastic toys that are, in turn, replicas of cartoon characters featured in blockbuster movies. The humble peasants are really actors imitating what they think hard labor looks like, based on a mix of children’s books about John Henry, Sam Cooke lyrics, and online porn.
Some books serve a clear purpose. Other books serve no purpose at all. Still other books serve a clear purpose but not the one indicated in the book’s title. Because Tucker Max’s first book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was a compendium of comedic anecdotes about blind-drunk sex and repugnant hijinks that inadvertently became a kind of how-to lifestyle manual for aggressively unlikable douche bags everywhere, it follows that the author would come to pen an actual how-to lifestyle manual for aggressively unlikable douche bags that seems inadvertently poised to take the comedy world by storm.
Teaching writers to record their life stories involves no small amount of hand-holding—and for good reason. Even after years of journaling or jotting down passing thoughts, the act of sharing your first-person stories with the world can feel like a kind of perversion, like sweating all over someone’s couch or coughing into the clam dip at a cocktail party. On the wrong day, even popular writers’ rallying cries—such as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones—feel like gorgeously embossed invitations to spread your germs far and wide.
The truth is out there. You can’t miss it, in fact—it’s everywhere. But even as we embrace the twenty-four-hour confession cycle of social media, the popularity, and subsequent disparagement, of the memoir reveals our (true) mixed feelings about true stories. We might be lured into tales of harrowing childhoods or devastating divorces, but our internal machinery will monitor the narratives based on the same arbitrary rubrics that guard our own personal revelations (or lack thereof): Is the author honest about his motives? Are her experiences exotic enough to teach us something new? Does he learn a great big lesson at
These days, comic-book enthusiasts are often portrayed as somber scholars, and feminists get caricatured as obsessive eccentrics—so it’s natural to wonder when, exactly, the world went topsy-turvy. A mere glance at photos of suffragettes marching proudly in the streets in 1917 can incite a feeling of liberation vertigo: Where did the last century go? Women’s rights entered a swirling comics-style time tunnel and emerged looking more like a fanatical hobby. Meanwhile, creating superheroes was transformed from a down-market, and definitely obsessive, side project into a handsomely rewarded higher calling.
Proclaiming oneself “truly humbled” often signals that one could use much more humbling, preferably via a knuckle sandwich. Yet self-serving announcements of humility have become the posturing trend of the moment among celebrities. Leo DiCaprio is “deeply humbled” by his Oscar nomination. Kanye West is humbled by the love of his fans. Ridley Scott is “truly humbled” by his recent knighting. In modern parlance, humility is the natural outcome of a crowdsourced tongue bath.
Recently, my daughter asked me to rewind the car radio so we could hear a song again. I was forced to explain the rudimentary technology known as broadcast, which doesn’t obey your commands so much as spray out an ignorant blast of waves in every direction. Her confusion at this ludicrously antiquated format led me to describe a battery of outmoded gadgets, like stationary telephones and bulky, blurry TV sets.
