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Hello. As you may have registered, this blog is now seldom updated. The reason for this is not as you might (justifiably) assume, laziness, but the opposite: industry. For the last six months we've been putting together an attractive, perfect-bound magazine for your perusal. It's called Special Request. In it you will find features from Geoff Dyer, Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Meades and many, many more. It looks and smells good; better, at least, than your computer monitor.

If you're in the UK, you'll find it stocked at all the usual art galleries, high-end newsagents and Urban Outfitters. If you're in the US, bear with us. It's coming.

Don't worry too much. Magazines are a lot like blogs. They're full of words and pictures. You have to pay for them (which feels bad) but they're made of paper (which feels good).

Our first issue features writing from Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Meades, Sam Lipsyte, Jacob Blandy. Also included, Coolio, GZA, Margot Henderson, Jacob Holdt, Thomas Bayrle and millions more. It's the "real deal".

Click the link.

John Jeremiah Sullivan on The Real World

They're all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about our "goals." Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, "People don't get me here." Walking around half-naked with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is, y'all. (What-what!) And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. That's right. But crying, crying, crying. My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows. And I just get so exhausted with my countrypeople—you know the ones, the ones you run into who are all like, "Oh gosh, reality TV? I've never even seen it. Is it really that interesting?" I mean, I'm sorry, but go starve. To me that's about as noble as being like, "Oh, Nagasaki? I've never even heard of that!" This is us, bros. This is our nation. A people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

Wells Tower takes his Dad to Burning Man. (This is bliss.)

We pick a campsite in a quiet neighborhood on an outer ring of the city. To one side of us, some rather abject fraternity gentlemen cower in the lee of their Subaru having Heineken brews. Our closest neighbors are several women in their thirties whom James Dean promptly diagnoses as "horny" by means of divination lost on the rest of us.

The professors mix up a batch of gin and tonics while Cam and I lash our miserable little Walmart gazebo to the chassis of the RV. I am tempted to nap in its washcloth-sized patch of shade, but my father has other plans. My father is dressed in adventure sandals, cargo shorts, a muslin tunic he bought in Thailand, and a nouveau legionnaire's chapeau complete with trapezius snood. Through a pair of dime-store spectacles ($4.99 price tag still on the lens) he is reading today's schedule of events. We have a happy range of activities from which to choose. Something called the Adult Diaper Brigade is welcoming participants. There is also "Make a Genital Necklace," "Fisting With Foxy," "3rd Annual Healthy Friction Circle Jerk," and "Naked Barista." Not all the offerings are lascivious. Some are educational ("Geology of the Black Rock Desert"), creative-anachro-geeky ("Excalibur Initiation and Dragon Naming Ceremony"), culinary ("FREE FUCKIN' ICE CREAM!!"), and spiritual ("Past Life Regression Meditation"). None of these options are seriously entertained.

Rachel Aviv follows a young, gay woman living on the streets of NY,

In a purple spiral-bound notebook, she created a guide for life on the streets. She listed the locations of soup kitchens, public libraries, bottle-return vending machines, thrift stores, and public sports clubs, where she could slip in for free showers. Under the heading “known homeless encampments,” she wrote down all the parks, boardwalks, and tunnels where she could sleep and the subway line she’d take to get there. Her most detailed entry was a description of an abandoned train tunnel in Harlem and the name of a photographer who had taken pictures of the homeless people who lived in it. She hoped that if she mentioned the photographer’s name she would be “accepted by the underground society.”

Andrew O’Hagan writes about child abuse, the BBC and the British public

It was a time of Player’s cigarettes and gin after hours at the pubs on Great Portland Street. Broadcasting House was a maze of stairwells, long corridors and unknown powers, a world within worlds that couldn’t quite decide whether it was a branch of the civil service or a theatrical den. Many of the men who worked there were getting their own way in the national interest, and the best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy of Whitehall with the languor of Fitzrovia. It was Patrick Hamilton in conversation with George Smiley down a blind alley off Rathbone Place, with froth sliding down the insides of pint tumblers and lipsticked fags in every ashtray. Men such as Gamlin practically lived in Langham Place: their outer bounds were Soho, Bloomsbury, Marylebone, and everything else was the World Service.

In the issue of Lilliput magazine for May 1943 Gamlin wrote an essay called ‘Why I Hate Boys’, which is signed ‘A School-Master’. It was a developing theme, boys, children, whatever, and in 1946 Methuen published a book written by Gamlin and Anthony Gilbert called Don’t Be Afreud! A Short Guide to Youth Control (The Book of the Weak). The book is just about as funny as it wants to be, with author photographs (‘aged 7 and 8 approx’) and a caption: ‘The authors on their way to the Psychoanalyst’. Gamlin, in common with later youthquakers such as Jimmy Savile, never liked children, never had any, never wanted any, and on the whole couldn’t bear them, except on occasion to fuck.

By Wells Tower

About eight months ago, I was tasked with an assignment: Starting in South Carolina, I would follow Governor Mitt "Tin Man" Romney on the long trail, from winter to summer of his life's most important year. My job was to get as close to the candidate as possible on a mission of the spirit: to search for signs of genuine life, to spy out those remnants of the candidate's humanity not yet blown to smithereens in the psyops war between the campaign and the press. In that time, I have learned a few things. Those things are these.

Thanks to his campaign's all but unprecedented restrictive vigilance in the media-access department, trying to penetrate the veneer of the Romney brand is like trying to split a billiard ball with a butter knife. Getting anywhere close to him will require you to suffer repeated, soul-depleting exposures to his campaign anthem, Kid Rock's "Born Free." You will also endure an uncountable number of citizens reciting this sentence verbatim: "I like his business background, and I think he's got the best chance of beating Obama." You will hear people applauding with dire fervor for huge transnational oil-bearing tubes, for voter-identification laws, for Mitt Romney's plan to defund PBS: "Big Bird is gonna have to get used to cornflakes." In lieu of actual access, you will be reduced to spending many stageside hours formulating new descriptions of the governor's hair and speculating on which side he dresses to. (The evidence suggests it's the left.) You will come to sort of adore Ann Romney and to believe her when she says that when Mitt wondered aloud whether he was the right man for the job, she asked her husband, "Can you save America?"

Two years after Nancy Jo Sales profiled the "Prep-School Gangsters" selling drugs to NYs finest, she tracked down those same kids. Most of them, she found, had been dating Liv Tyler or pitching Puffy movie scripts. They all went on to own new-media companies. Total nightmares. Cross yourself: this is about to get hellish.

Shawn sits beside Heather at a Mac 8100; they're designing Danücht's line sheets, or specifications for production. Shawn is Danücht's main designer, although he's a film student at SVA and says what he'd really like to do is direct. "I just do the designing 'cause it comes easy to me." With his thick black hair, goatee, and flashing white teeth, he's the crew's more adult-looking member; 21, he could pass for 27 (and once dated the girl they all know as Liv -- Tyler, of course). He's making an independent film now that, he says, "is very much about the lifestyle" -- meaning their lives growing up in New York. He's highly aware of the film potential in the abundance of stories they've amassed in their years as city kids. They hope Danücht will eventually have a film division. "People are writing screenplays right and left."

A pair of sweatpants appears on the screen. Heather types as Shawn reads the line for the catalogue: "For the active, on-the-go pimp in us all," he says.

"Pimping is just chillin' out in the utmost style," explains Justin, bopping around the office, eating deli salad. "And Danücht's what the well-dressed pimp should be relaxing in."

Shawn flips through a book of their fashion plates -- polo shirts, hats, T-shirts. I LOVE LUCCI -- meaning money -- one T-shirt says. Others say RIKER'S ISLAND, ATTICA, SING SING, and DANÜCHT: DOWN BY LAW. One just says YOBRO.

"We're trying to sum up all aspects of youth," Justin says. "Like hip-hop, grunge, street, thug . . . "

"We need some more girl shit," says Shawn.

Justin thinks. "Hmmmm. I tell you, right now, the shit for girls, it's gotta be hard, 'cause girls are coming out hard. Like, 'Yo, what the deal, bitch, what?' "

Nancy Jo Sales on rich-kids playing gangster in 1996.

"We sell to Dalton, Trinity, Horace Mann, Spence, Chapin, Columbia Prep, mad girls from Brearley" he goes on. "Basically every school you can name."

A.Z.'s got rolling papers on his legs; he's fixing up a "cone", a filtered joint of chronic. They say their "shit is so strong, if you've never smoked it you can start hallucinating".

"We got all the butter crusties", says A.Z. Including, they say, the daughter of the owner of a media conglomerate; an Academy Award-winning actor's son; a former child star ("He's been having ecstasy parties since he was 14 years old"); the daughter of a celebrated painter; the painter himself...

"If only you saw my Filofax" A.Z. says.

"That's why we're so successful", offers Pete. "That's our clientele."

"I'm an opportunist" says A.Z. His mother is a high-level executive at one of the biggest companies in the world.

by Emily Witt

I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile. I read 19th-century novels to remind myself that sunny equanimity in the aftermath of heartbreak was not always the order of the day. On the other hand, online dating sites are the only places I’ve been where there’s no ambiguity of intention. A gradation of subtlety, sure: from the basic ‘You’re cute,’ to the off-putting ‘Hi there, would you like to come over, smoke a joint and let me take nude photos of you in my living room?’

The largest free dating site in America is another algorithm-based service, Plenty of Fish, but in New York everyone I know uses OK Cupid, so that’s where I signed up. I also signed up to Match, but OK Cupid was the one I favoured, mostly because I got such constant and overwhelming attention from men there. The square-jawed bankers who reigned over Match, with their pictures of scuba diving in Bali and skiing in Aspen, paid me so little attention it made me feel sorry for myself. The low point came when I sent a digital wink to a man whose profile read, ‘I have a dimple on my chin,’ and included photos of him playing rugby and standing bare-chested on a deep-sea fishing vessel holding a mahi-mahi the size of a tricycle. He didn’t respond to my wink.

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

Christian Lorentzen reviews Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max.

Three things: 1) look at the black lab in the pic below, enjoy it 2) I don't want to be all 'investing in the canon' and shiz so this is the last DFW post for a while 3) the biography is a good one and you should buy it.

He was precocious and diligent but also capable of hideous behaviour, especially towards Amy, whom he taunted about her weight and once dragged across the lawn through dog shit. He apologised by giving her his bicycle. He was a melancholic from around the age of ten: ‘Summer 71 or 72,’ he wrote as an adult in a medical history, ‘First occasion of “Depressive, clinically anxious feelings”.’ Another later note on his adolescent self: ‘Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference.’ Yet, as Max writes, ‘his classmates remember him as cheerful, popular, funny.’ In high school he wrote in a tiny script to thwart cheating peers looking over his shoulder and would complete the full term’s reading and papers in its first weeks to leave more time for playing tennis.

Disclaimer: unless you live under a rock, you've almost certainly read this. Zadie Smith on Jay Z

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

Devin Friedman spends one night at The Marquee, Las Vegas. Hates it.

We watched Benassi. We had Joe take us to the private bathroom (that's a service he provided, "bathroom walks") and felt as if we had paid to pretend we were kind of famous. We had our ice changed twice in fifteen minutes. (We were now timing it.) We watched people raising their hands in the air, either in a kind of Euro tomahawk chop or in an uncomfortably heil-like gesture—this has replaced the booty grind now that electronic dance music has replaced hip-hop in some clubs—and dancing pretty much without moving their feet.

We saw that our ice hadn't been changed in half an hour and started feeling kind of irate. We let Jessica pour rounds and rounds of drinks for these female Asian chem majors from Cal who kept waving and winking to their boyfriends who were railbirding it on the lower level of the dance floor, watching as their dates got their free drinks on. We saw, at the table behind ours, that a member of the bro posse we figured was either Lebanese, French, or Israeli had vomited. Like really vomited. It was as if a Hale and Hearty Soups had exploded at table 96. But it didn't take a full minute before a team of men in black materialized, equipped with an arsenal of towels and cleaning solvents, to scrub the area, and the puker, absolutely pukeless. They were a vomit pit crew. In no time at all they had propped the guy up, faced him toward the dance floor, poured him a glass of ice water, and disappeared.

Philip K Dick gets weird on the possibility of alternative realities; if I'm not mistaken, suggests that he may have actually been to a parallel universe. :-/

May I tell you how much I appreciate your asking me to share some of my ideas with you. A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash -- the obviously worthless ideas -- and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his existence. But such truly priceless ideas. . . perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his existence to himself and to his God.

George Saunders on Dubai, before we properly knew it was an abject exploitative nightmare.

In Which I Fall In Love With A Fake Town

From the air, Dubai looked something like Dallas circa 1985: a vast expanse of one- or two-story white boxes, punctuated by clusters of freakish skyscrapers. (An Indian kid shouted, "Dad, looks like a microchip!") Driving in from the airport, you're struck by the usual first-night-in-new-country exotica ("There's a Harley-Davidson dealership—right in the Middle East!"), and the skyscraper clusters were, okay, odd looking (like four or five architects had staged a weird-off, with unlimited funds)—but all in all, it was, you know, a city. And I wondered what all the fuss was about.

Then I got to my hotel.

The Madinat Jumeirah is, near as I can figure, a superresort consisting of three, or possibly six, luxury sub-hotels and two, or maybe three, clusters of luxury villas, spread out over about forty acres, or for all I know it was twelve sub-hotels and nine luxury-villa clusters—I really couldn't tell, so seamless and extravagant and confusing was all the luxury. The Madinat is themed to resemble an ancient Arabian village. But to say the Madinat is themed doesn't begin to express the intensity and opulence and areal extent of the theming. The site is crisscrossed by 2.3 miles of fake creeks, trolled night and day by dozens of fake Arabian water taxis (abras) piloted by what I can only describe as fake Arabs because, though dressed like old-timey Arabs, they are actually young, smiling, sweet-hearted guys from Nepal or Kenya or the Philippines, who speak terrific English as they pilot the soundless electrical abras through this lush, created Arabia, looking for someone to take back to the lobby, or to the largest outdoor pool in the Middle East, or over to Trader Vic's, which is also themed and looks something like a mysterious ancient Casbah inexplicably filled with beautiful contemporary people.

The late, great David Rakoff on Steven Seagal's career as a teacher of Tibettan Buddhism

I will come to know it as the Omega Hug: the official embrace of the Omega Institute of Holistic Studies. The woman in the fringed halter top and wraparound skirt sees someone se knows. Walking across the wide planked veranda—long limbed as a Modigliani, her ankle bracelets of tiny silver bells tintinnabulating as she moves—she embraces her friend, eyes closed, a beatific smile on her face, her hand moving slowly and healingly up and down the other's back. The Omega hug is long and intense—it takes a full half minute to execute—but I will see it countless times over the next three days.

At the moment, there is plenty of time to hug. About 200 of us are sitting around waiting for Steven Seagal to arrive at the famed New Age retreat center. Set in Rhinebeck, New York, among the gently rolling hills of the Hudson Valley, the Omega Institute usually expends its exquisitely positive energy offering hundreds of courses and seminars, led by such reigning spiritual superstars as Deepak Chopra. Courses like "Out of Body Experiences and Dream Exploration," "The Art of Everyday Ecstasy" and "Women's Sacred Summer Camp." But this Memorial Day weekend the seminar is title "Cultivating Compassion & Clarity," and the teacher is none other than Seagal—movie star, aikido master and, lately, teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

According to the Omega minivan driver who picked me up at the train station, a Santa type who lives six months of the year in a nudist colony in Florida, this weekend's seminar is quite an occasion, second only to the one led by Thay Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and author who attracts seven hundred attendees. There is some concern that it is Seagal's reputation as a aikido master, as opposed to his fame as a movie star, that will bring out the crazies. "You know," says the driver, "guys who want to be able to say they mixed it up with Steven Seagal."

At the risk of becoming a one-blog PR machine charged only with ensuring the success of John Jeremiah Sullivan, here's another brilliant essay from JJS. I kind of wanted to leave it a while, but I'm a sucker for these bad-dad stories. So here it is...

The camper containing Shell, Trevor, Flora and Lil’ Dog moved south-southeast from Chattanooga. We were converging like lines on a graphing calculator. Unless you are very, very strong, the time will come when you Disney, and our time had come, unrolling like a glaring scroll in the form of I-95. It was a Saturday. The next day would be Father’s Day. This whole voyage, it turned out, was billed as a Father’s Day gift to me and Trevor, which in my case was like having been shot with a heavy barbiturate dart and bundled off to your own birthday party. Nonetheless I had little anxiety — a total lack of options will often produce a strange, free feeling. In the rearview mirror, Mimi practically strained her car-seat buckles with impatience. My highway thoughts passed through a curious phase of gratitude toward Walter Disney, as an individual, for having made possible such an intensity of childhood joy. Maybe Trevor felt the same about his little brood, hundreds of miles away, fewer each minute.

There’s something I should mention about Trevor, though I wouldn’t if it weren’t relevant to much of what came later, but he smokes a stupendous amount of weed. Think of a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, that’s 20 cigarettes. Trevor smokes about that many joints, on a heavy day, the first one while he’s making coffee. And yet is highly functional in all social and professional senses, or almost all. I’ve definitely seen him muff some conversations. Still, 90 percent of the time he’s one of the sharpest and most interesting people I know. But to repeat: the brother is always, always high...

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