Zombie Hero of our time

On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision,  on the road in the hills above a Club Med in Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and anthropologist from Canada. He wrote an article that begins with the details of the accident, and its cause, which was as follows: in the backseat with Douyon was a man who, as the taxi driver in front understood from the conversation they were having, was dead. The name of the man was Clerveus Narcisse. The taxi...

Superhost

The vacation rental industry is just weird. We go into homes owned by other people with security cameras through which they can watch us and act like it’s no big deal. This inherently discomfiting situation was unpacked well in Dave Franco's ambitious "The Rental" last year and it returns as the center of Brandon Christensen’s effective "Superhost," a story of two vloggers who stumble into the wrong rental. It’s slight even in its short run time, but it’s anchored by an impressively unhinged ...

Tell It Slant

I don’t know of any journalist who’s had the pleasure of reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat and not dreamt of writing a book ‘just’ like it. And that’s because the author’s brilliant stop and start 1976 novel about a female reporter living in an unnamed city glistens with authenticity, not only when it comes to her protagonist Jen Fain’s career as a journalist, but all the existential stuff that fucks your head up as you go about the business of trying to report, including how to navigate the u...

homer | Origin and meaning of the name homer by Online Etymology Dictionary

Homer traditional name of the supposed author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," from Latin Homerus, from Greek Homeros. It is identical to Greek homeros "a hostage," said to also mean in dialects "blind" (the connecting notion is "going with a companion"). But the name also has been otherwise explained.homer (n.)short for home run, from 1868. It also meant "pigeon trained to fly home from a distance" (1880). As a verb in the baseball...

Anatomical tour of what it means to be human - and escaping the City