When I started sobbing on a daily basis, I knew something was seriously wrong. I began to feel paranoid, fretting about interactions I’d had with other people. If friends or family didn’t instantly reply to a message, I assumed they hated me. Some days, I didn’t get out of bed at all.
The truth was, I was depressed — but at the age of 21, with my whole life ahead of me, I had no obvious reason to be.
It
The first tide of syringes washed ashore on Thursday, August 13, 1987. Hundreds of unmarked hypodermic needles spilled out of the surf that afternoon, accompanied by vials and prescription bottles, along a 50-mile stretch of New Jersey beaches during peak tourist season. By the next morning, New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, an environmentalist Republican with national ambitions, was aloft in a helicopter surveying the floating slick of medical waste and other garbage that now stretched from Manasquan to Atlantic
PAUL BUNYAN: The Invention of an American Legend, by Noah Van Sciver
Before there was fake news, there were tall tales. Often associated with the history of westward expansion, most of these tales carried expiration dates, their relevance fading in a dramatically changed world. But others turned out to have staying power as implausible as the mythic characters they celebrate.
In 1916, when W.B. Laughead, an advertising manager for Minnesota’s Red River Timber Company, published a pamphlet to promote the
When Carr Van Anda joined The New York Times as its managing editor on February 14, 1904, the temperature inside the office dropped a few degrees—or so it felt.
Van Anda, age 39, was a chilly newsroom presence, a formal man who wore rimless glasses and a stickpin through his starched collars. Times reporters lived in fear of his chastening glare. They called it the “death ray.”
The most famous stories about “V.A.,” as he was known around the
When gold was found in the American River in 1848, a brand-new world was born—one that thrust Northern California into the perpetual spotlight, and one in which the market’s insatiable appetite for “innovation” solidified, however ironically, the region’s loyalty to draconian conceptions of racial order. The miners are, in effect, still here—their wash pans have just become iPhones—and still doing their part to uphold a long-standing tradition of the American West: overpromising and under-delivering,
