Sublime

and friendly, what would be the point of

Not handsome, exactly—in fact, he teetered on the edge of ugly: short and slightly stocky, with thinning black hair. But his skin was deeply tanned, as though he flew to the Mediterranean instead of the endless Minneapolis-Detroit-Chicago route, and his thick lips were sensual, his teeth startling white. He exuded a vitality and alertness that was

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

like to toy with human thought like boys toy with beetles.

fucked-up rich kids. My son the doctor Mark Vonnegut, who wrote a swell book about his going crazy in the 1960s, and then graduated from Harvard Medical School, had an exhibition of his watercolors in Milton, Massachusetts, this summer.

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

On September 12, 2013, I reported Avomeen’s results in an article titled “How Chris McCandless Died,” which was published on The New Yorker website.

A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.