By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 Offhand, I can’t think of anything I don’t like as much as I don’t like intellectuals. I suppose they have their uses, the same as adversity and the study of Latin verbs—but they are accordingly as unpleasant and as...
By Chip Brown Harper’s February 1992 From the outset the deaths had come in flurries, often at night when the house was hushed, and so it was no surprise last May that when Bill died Hector followed on his heels, and then Harvey, and then Jack. The news was posted in...
By Tom Junod Life April 1991 “Are you safe?” is what she always asks the children. It is what she asks the exhausted little boy who has just driven nonstop with his mother from New Hampshire to Atlanta in a rattling VW bus; what she asks the hotel-bound boy whose last...
By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone December 13th-27th, 1990 “I had meant to time the closing of the door with a subtle emission of a fart,” my guru said as he pulled shut the door to his room at the Holiday Inn in Oxford, Mississippi. “Evidently my timing was off.” He...
By Stephen Fried Fame May, 1990 Peter Beard is trying to organize another expedition. This one promises to be far tamer than any of the African safaris, walkabouts, and fact-finding missions he’s pulled off as cameraman, artist, adventurer, playboy, doomsayer,...
By Nicholas Pileggi The New York Times Magazine August 15, 1971 As was his custom before the drive home from work with his son, the old man walked across the narrow, tenement‐lined street in Manhattan’s Little Italy to buy some fresh fruit. The grocer, who had known...
By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire August 1973 Sergeant Forrest Hinderliter of the Gila Bend (Arizona) Police had been up since two in the morning with a dead body and a shaky story. He’d found the body—a black man with a bullet hole in his back—lying on the floor in Apartment...
By Stephen Fried The Washington Post Magazine May 18, 1997 “You want to see it?” Emilio Emini offers to show me the enzyme on which he bet 10 years of his virology career and a billion dollars of his company’s money. Rising from his desk, Emini, who is tall, dark and...
By Mary Bruno New York Woman October 1988 Alessandra Stanley is slumped on a couch in the lobby of the Merrimack Hilton. Amidst the frenzy all around her, she looks like an oasis of repose. But her blue eyes are aggressively alert. They slip and dart like a cat’s,...
By Judith Rossner The Movies November 1983 Pornography, erotica, fantasies of beautiful women are probably as old as excess energy and leisure time. It was Hugh Hefner’s inspiration to bring them, on a large scale and slickly packaged, into the middle-class living...
By Sara Davidson My Generation September 2001 It’s eight a.m. on New Year’s morning and I’m sitting in the darkened hall of the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Los Angeles, staring at the cluster of swamis in red sitting cross-legged on the floor. There’s a slender...
By Tom Junod Life July 1991 She would board the plane in Albuquerque, although she knew that doing so could kill her. She would fly to New York and then to Belgrade and Sarajevo, where she would get on a bus. Thirty-five hours it was supposed to take Carol Lynn Leland...
