Prose

“An Open Letter to Wikipedia, In Re: Myself,” by David Guaspari

Nov 6th, 2024 | By

Where to begin? With your relentless negativity? That snotty list of what Wikipedia is not? Not a dictionary, publisher of original thought, means of promotion, blog, memorial site, manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal. Not censored. (Sez who!?!) A nihilistic orgy of not-ness. Contributors (or, to use your cloying jargon, Wikipedians) are told to “Be bold!” Yet boldness, one soon learns, invites retaliation—with accusations and insults including, but hardly limited, to “blatant hoax” (Speedy Deletion Criterion G3) and “no indication of importance” (SDC A7).



“The Common Features of Other People’s Houses,” by Sarp Sozdinler

Oct 30th, 2024 | By

No particle of dust would dare occasion to life and every speck of fingernail dirt is manicured to death in those matrimonial homes where attention to detail is a time-honored virtue and everything smells of the same multipurpose detergent, like bedsheets in sad hotels. Those houses are policed by unimpressed Virgos who massage their furniture with spit and wash their mopheads as frequently as their hair. If living inside a toothpaste tube were a social norm, those homeowners would be the forebearers of an all-white nation.



“Stumpy Yums: A True Story,” by Libby Molyneaux

Oct 23rd, 2024 | By

When my son was about three days old, I was still figuring out breast-feeding—how to do it, where to do it.

One of my worries, though, was our big shaggy Disney dog Guinness and how she would react to the baby. Guinness was my girl. She looked more like me than my own child—same shaggy brown hair, same brown eyes. She was the center of our attention for the eight years we’d had her, so I even stupidly bought a muzzle imagining her unwelcoming reaction to the baby. 



“Rubric: Text Response Time as Basis for Personal Relationship Intimacy,” by Nathan Leslie

Oct 16th, 2024 | By

One Second: This person is in love/lust with you or is feeling guilty for something minor they did that you may perceive as major, or is in some way extremely needy on a cellular level. Could also be auto-reply.

Ten Seconds: This person is a major friend, or perhaps work underling who admires you. It could also be a person who is in love/lust with you who was pausing slightly to encourage you to believe, for one moment, that they are not as much in love/lust with you as you might think they actually are. If work underling—they clearly envy your job and would like to have it.



“How to Date a Celebrity,” by Bela Seitz

Oct 9th, 2024 | By

Your social media needs to be scraped clean of any evidence of a wild life or a connection to the public eye; celebrities prefer significant others who the press will assume is a staff member at events because they look so ordinary. You can find celebrities at their jobs—in a dugout or an international screening of their new movie—but those aren’t where you should pursue a celebrity because, there, they are at work. Instead, catch them in their element: the most exclusive restaurant in the city or the bar where, since they were in the same fraternity as one of the bouncers, they let loose without fear of repercussions. If you research them, which isn’t hard to do because their entire lives are plastered online, you will be able to find them in a place where they don’t put their public mask on like a sheet of grass where they tiredly walk their dog every morning.