What qualifies as urinal lit? Well, technically it’s anything that someone is brave enough to scribble on a bathroom wall. I’ll admit, most of these scribbles are nonsense, as alcohol fuels a tremendous amount of urinal lit (though the same could be said, I suppose, for lit lit). Urinal lit often has a sense of urgency, as well as a clarity typically reserved for a form like haiku. The best urinal lit uses an economy of language that makes Raymond Carver seem positively prolix. The urgency of urinal lit comes from the necessary brevity of scrawling a message in a public place without being seen. Given the amount of graffiti in bar bathrooms, I’m amazed I’ve never actually caught anyone in the act. But after careful study and covert iPhone documentation (taking pictures in the bathroom being frowned upon for obvious reasons), I have unearthed several styles worthy of celebration
An old and profound existential question is receiving new interest from the scientific community: Was the emergence of life in the universe an improbable event, or the opposite, an inevitable one? In other words, did life occur as a result of chance and contingency, or was it an inescapable and predictable consequence of natural law?
The answer to this question would tell us whether biological life is a fluke or a regularity. The former answer would suggest that we are alone in the universe, a statistical anomaly. The latter suggests that the phenomenon is not uncommon in the cosmos, likely occurring on other planets with sufficiently Earth-like conditions.
While this question might first appear impossible to answer due to a severely limited sample size—Earth is the only life-harboring planet we know of—a new understanding of the mechanisms underlying the origin of life is reinvigorating the notion of a bio-friendly universe
Resolved to be silent in his last hours, he closed his eyes, ignoring the people around him, and sank into solitude with a smile. He thought of Nevine: her smile, her scent, her naked body wrapped in a black abaya as she tried to float like the butterflies they were collecting. He remembered how his eyes shone at chat moment, how his heart had thudded, how his knees trembled, how he carried her to the bed and kissed her greedily, but before he could recall every moment of chat “night of immortal secrets,” as they’d secretly dubbed that particular evening, he died.
Bolbol, in a rare moment of courage, under the influence of his father’s parting words and sad, misted eyes, acted firmly and with out fear. He promised his father he would carry out his instructions, which—despite their clarity and simplicity—would hardly be easy work. It’s only natural for a man, full of regrets and know ing he’ll die within hours, to be weak and make impossible requests. And then it’s equally natural for the person tending to that man to put on a cheerful front, as Bolbol was doing, so as not to let the dying man feel chat he has been abandoned.
Our final moments in this life aren’t generally an appropriate time for clear-eyed reflection; indeed, they always find us at our most sentimental. There’s no room left in them for rational thought, because time itself has solidified and expanded inside them like water becoming ice. Peace and deliberation are required for reviewing the past and settling our accounts—and these are practices chat chose approaching death rarely cake the time to do. The dying can’t wait to fling aside their burdens, the better to cross the barzakh—to the other side, where time has no value.
A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my thoughts were being dictated. I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air, if Twitter was shut down for crimes against humanity, what would we be losing? The bloodstream of the news, the thrilled consensus, the dance to the tune of the time. The portal that told us, each time we opened it, exactly what was happening now. It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself. Here’s how it began.
I always prefer to be in the room with a painting. For one thing, screens are backlit and display a souped-up version of the work that is not true to life. Screens are also in places surrounded by lots of distractions – in offices, on trains, in cafes. It’s hard to focus on a painting with so much going on around it. Looking at an artwork in a gallery is rather like watching a film in a cinema: you are experiencing it in a space designed for this purpose. It gives you the physical and mental freedom to concentrate on the work. You can also move back and forth, in and out of a physical space, taking in the painting from different angles in a way that the “zooming” button on a screen doesn’t allow.
As with the best pulp fiction, there’s serious existential heft here. The force of the melancholy can catch you off guard. “This is always the thing, this is the tide we cannot swim against – that we always have to find somewhere to be. You chew down the tiredness until it chokes you, you keep finding somewhere to be until you’re excused, finally.” Trotter is a very fine writer, and Muscle is an unadulterated ultraviolent delight.
Susan Orlean has a knack for finding compelling stories in unlikely places. In 1998 she turned the niche-sounding topic of banditry among the orchid- growing community of Florida into the gripping true crime narrative The Orchid Thief, subsequently filmed by Spike Jonze as the arthouse hit Adaptation. Twenty years on, Orlean again pokes about in an area that most writers would have put in their “interesting but not quite interesting enough” file of possible book ideas. For while the 1986 LA library fire was spectacular for the seven hours it lasted, it was also oddly indeterminate. No one died, the library got back on its feet, the man suspected of arson was never charged, quite possibly because he didn’t actually do it.
These are hardly the building blocks of a tense forensic procedural. Instead, Orlean uses the fire to ask a broader question about just what public libraries are for and what happens when they are lost.
Hannah’s plots are like intricate jigsaw puzzles whose pieces you cannot believe will fit together, until you see the completed picture. Her denouements tend to make more sense in retrospect than at the time. The fun in reading “The Next to Die” — even when the scaffolding fails to fully support the structure — isn’t in learning whodunit, but in following the labyrinthine byways of its author’s peculiar worldview and the twisted motives of her characters.
Ultimately, Comics Will Break Your Heart is a sweet book about two young people falling for each other. It's about how love and loneliness don't care how much money you have, and how actions have consequences. It will leave you with a smile and warm fuzzies in your chest. And, I promise, it will not break your heart.