What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of...
It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing.
The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.
It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone's existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you're avoiding confronting it directly is that it's something you do...
Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just...
Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.
Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busy work of living
The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a nec...
