May 5, 2025
March 15, 2014
Is it any wonder that we secretly view laughter as black magic, unpredictably hazardous? Only when you hear the common evolutionary explanation for laughter: it serves to express relief. Not just from the urge to laugh, but from some awful danger, a cosmic threat imagined by and for the self.
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March 10, 2014
Never were politics, power, and punch lines more intertwined than in the strange case of John Wilmot. The second Earl of Rochester was a poet and playwright whose mischief-making lifestyle and caustic satirical writing got him banished from court (and invited back) on what seems to have been a routine basis. This was a man who lived as he wrote.
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March 05, 2014
Whenever a newspaper story came up short, editors reached for the squibs.
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February 22, 2014
At first glance, Ambrose Bierce didn’t look like a coldblooded verbal killer. He was tall and handsome and scrupulously groomed, with a cherubic mop of golden hair. He excelled as a conversationalist and womanizer. He was also was nineteenth-century America’s greatest insult artist.
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January 15, 2014
Comedy thrives on contradiction, and the absurdity of life is particularly refined in the hospital. Doctors discuss breakfast as they open someone’s sternum, and a delirious patient demands green Jell-O. Laughter, it seems, is one of the few genuine reactions one can have to such a paradoxical world. But it can be deceiving.
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January 15, 2014
“Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection,” wrote the perpetually pedantic Philip Dormer Stanhope to his son in 1758, “but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity.”
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December 31, 2013
Artists throughout history have striven to personify death: to translate the intangible, unknown end of human beings into an image that can be perceived by the eye and grasped by the mind.
Read MoreDecember 22, 2013
Everyone thinks they know the tragic story of James Dean: he died young and violently, he embodied the ennui and angst of the postwar generation, and his image lives on as a hollow signifier of youthful rebellion. But most don’t understand how the timing of his death, and the very specific timing of his films, turned a tragic death into a cultural crater—one that would be widened and exploited by the Hollywood publishing industry.
Read MoreDecember 19, 2013
The collection of Japanese war trophies—which included various body parts, including skulls—was, by all accounts, endemic and uncontrollable. When Charles Lindbergh returned to the States after a tour in the Pacific theater, he was asked by customs officers if he was carrying any “human bones” in his luggage.
Read More2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.