Wait, we cured depression?
by Benjamin Wachs
Charles Barber writes in Salon that we now live in the Age of Trauma.
Every era has a particular mental disorder, you see, and for 21st century America that disorder is...
Dreaming
by Leslie Ingham
The mother was dreaming about the closet.
The closet was always there, just around the corner in Bill’s room, a closet with a lock on the outside.
She’d only been put in there three times, but it seemed like fifty because of the dreams.
No louvres....
Origins
by Benjamin Wachs
This is how it happened.
Time is circular, so after the serpent convinced Adam and Even to bite the forbidden apple, they were given the knowledge of good and evil, made more like God, and expelled from paradise. Not being God, they did not understand why, and so...
The Mattress Inspector
by Stephanie Vernier
Fully clothed, Richard Yoost lay flat as a plank across the covers on the king-size bed. It was ninety degrees out and only a slight cross breeze came through the bedroom windows. The plank position was his first response test, and he learned early on it left an...
Let's map the cracks in reality!
by Benjamin Wachs
William Eggington has an essay in the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog about the way in which Borges and Kant(among others) prefigured the...
Midnight Blue
by St. John Campbell
I was alone in the forest. I was alone on the hill. The sky above me was midnight blue, and its darkness shone like a sheet of glass in the moonlight. But there was no moon. There were even no stars, though there should have been: the nearest town was dozens of...
The Dare
by Anita Anand
“How could you stand there naked in front of a bunch of strangers, stark naked?”
Phil didn’t get it, and that saddened Karen a bit. He usually got her perfectly.
“Well, for a shy person, it was the perfect job. I didn’t have to talk to anybody, or make eye...
The “Social Media Self” now has a manifesto
by Benjamin Wachs
Facebook ergo sum. Or, by contrast: I am not on Facebook, therefore I do not exist.
This is not the conclusion of an extraordinary new article by Rob Horning, “Google Alert...
Authority
by St. John Campbell
Once, he had graded papers. People make jokes about a red pen, but it had been standard, back in those days, and the students hadn’t argued. The red, like the robe of an inquisitor, had meant authority. He was a polymath, teaching history and mathematics both … a...
You Ruined Batman!
by Benjamin Wachs
I’m going to admit something.
Back when I was a kid, a truly little kid, I would sit in front of the TV and watch the old 60’s Batman show … and didn’t know that it was camp.
Come on. What did I know from camp? I vaguely knew how the whole “superhero”...