The other day I walked through the rain to my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I would get a card to make this move official. Until you have a library card you can pretend you’re off the grid, but my gypsy days are over because I borrowed a spy film and a [...]
Author Archive > Wistar
Cooking with Butter
“Who are the real writers?” asks the author of Cooking with Butter (unpublished 2012, 2013). What are they cooking with? What superior foods lubricate their baking dishes and frying pans? How do they manage to flavor without butter, my accent ingredient? Is it wrong to obsess about the cookbooks of other authors? What makes them [...]
Dropping the f-bomb in labor & delivery
If you are in the midst of having a baby, I am perhaps not the *best* person to accompany you into labor & delivery, but I am also not the *worst*. For instance, some people are psychotic. Some people have Ebola. When you invite me into your labor & delivery room, you can expect my [...]
Let’s talk more science, okay
Because I went to art school, I understand how science works. When I’m zipping around Brooklyn trying to find a communal apartment so I can regress to my twenties and I walk into a duplex where a potential roommate is cooking up some body wax on the stove top because he’s about to strip off [...]
“What Am I Thinking of?
My little brother recently came home from eight months in Australia with a new game. It’s called “What Am I Thinking of?” and it seems poised on the brink of bridging the tragic divide between human skulls. With this game you can finally penetrate the consciousness of your fellow man. It’s the most exhilarating science [...]
Snowflake tech support
Last night my sister’s husband and I stared at a stack of white paper, trying to figure out how to turn it into snowflakes. I had folded one sheet into squares, and my very handy brother-in-law was probably a minute away from making an origami buffalo. Fortunately his mother called. In June she’d retired from [...]
This whole question of sincerity
As if sincerity is something that needs to be defended. Life is hard and sad and wonderful people die all the time. This is why we must make jokes. Like yesterday I cut open my knuckle trying to stab some ice loose with a corkscrew, and then I bled all over the baby I was [...]
Shitty things happening in Virginia and other internet broadcasts
Internet Hate/Love The Village Voice foresees social media platforms that won’t invade user privacy: But as the business press and slavering investors look on eagerly at Zuckerberg’s coronation, many believe that the seeds of Facebook’s downfall have already been sown. The company might have brought people together like never before, but exploitation is woven inextricably [...]
You may or may not know me from the JumboTron
Tonight my face was featured on the JumboTron. Why I was in the vicinity of a JumboTron is incidental; for the purposes of this story, just imagine that I have one in my bedroom. Seeing my image up there was exhilarating in a way that terrifies me now. To my knowledge, my face has never [...]
Links: In sickness and in health
“Now That Books Mean Nothing”: 31-year-old author Nell Boeschenstein reflects on literature and her double mastectomy NPR interview with Louis C.K.: “You find yourself in front of a room of wounded veterans, and they just want to have fun. They want to see you go crazy. So every time I did these shows, I would [...]
