What Depersonalization Taught Me, at Age Three, About the Strangeness of the Self and the Weirdness of the World — and How the Pandemic Brought It All Back. (Part One of a multi-part essay.) When I was three years old, I discovered the horror of mirrors. No, that’s not quite…

Too often, the life blocks our view of the work. We can’t see past the myth: his rock-star fame; the boldfaced names in his orbit; his fatal embrace of the demon lover, heroin. Which is why, when you’re face to face with it, his art leaves you jaw-dropped. — I’m looking at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s spleen — actually, his drawing of his spleen, loosely rendered in black crayon on paint-spattered white paper. A purple, lobe-shaped organ cuddled up against the left kidney, the spleen filters our blood and, as part of the immune system, battles bacteria. Most of us couldn’t…

What do names tell us about people — and what should we have known about Trump? Nominative determinism: the gift that keeps giving. The term, coined by the British science journalist John Hoyland, in a 1994 New Scientist column, refers to the (purely hypothetical) tendency to pursue a calling or…

To be an American, picking your way through the debris field of what used to be, at least nominally, a democracy — before Trump and his confederacy of dunces defiled, corrupted, plundered, pimped, sabotaged, and otherwise destabilized it from within — is to live in a nation permanently on edge…

Alcohol offers a devil’s bargain: inspiration through disinhibition, at the cost of a few I.Q. points, maybe even an early grave. Why are writers, more than other artists, so willing to take that risk? — In the small hours of October 25, 2021, I was roused by an agonizing pain just below my sternum. This was no indigestion; I felt as if the leering goblin from The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli was squatting on my torso, walloping it with a meat mallet. Was it a…

Is it any mystery why rich tech bro’s (and their fanboys) love self-absorbed Roman philosopher-kings? — When Zeno of Citium (c. 335–263 B.C.E), the father of Stoicism, decided Providence was trying to tell him his time had come, he obligingly committed suicide — by holding his breath. Who said philosophers, famous for being long-winded, have no sense of humor? If the gods had shown him a…

Why do bald women make us uncomfortable? — Let’s unpack the cultural baggage — the misogynoir, the anxious masculinity, the Fear of the Weird— behind Chris Rock’s joke and Will Smith’s slap (with a little help from Isaac Hayes, Pat Evans — the badass with the bullwhip on those Ohio Players covers — and the warrior women from Black Panther). If Will Smith bitch-slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars taught us anything, it’s that defending “your” woman’s “honor” went out of fashion around the time Rhett Butler got dentures. Also, pathological masculinity is in need of a shorter, stouter choke chain.