This Is the Story of America's First Penis Transplant |
On a cold morning in January 2012, sixty-year-old bank courier Tom Manning was easing a hand truck loaded with heavy boxes down a slushy ramp behind his company's office in downtown Boston. His legs slipped out from under him and Manning went down hard. The cart, loaded with a hundred pounds of paperwork, toppled onto him, forcing a portion of his colon through his lower intestinal wall and steamrolling his genitals. The impact felt like an explosion, but shock muffled the initial pain. A water deliveryman who had heard the crash and Manning's howl rushed over to help him back on his feet. He thanked the guy, told him he was fine, and trudged up to the employee restroom to assess the damage, grabbing clean clothes from his locker on the way. Once he was behind a locked door, Manning carefully peeled off his military-style cargo pants, long johns, and underwear, each layer soaked through with Boston slush. The impact had caused the button fly of his pants to rake across his genitals, and as the shock wore off, his entire groin began to throb in time with his heartbeat. There was blood, but Manning couldn't tell where it was coming from because his penis had swollen to more than twice its usual size. Everything looked wrong. |
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| The Holdovers Is Tender, Triumphant, and Incorrigibly Corny |
Veteran director Alexander Payne's latest film, The Holdovers, takes place in a circa-1970 world we've seen on screen countless times before: bell bottoms, brown corduroy, Vietnam. But its trailer evokes a more recent, if equally gone era—the '80s and '90s when CG, IP, and other soul-killing acronyms were but a gleam in some studio executive's eye, and character-driven mid-budget storytelling still reigned supreme. (Franchises have always been in the mix, it's true. But try pitting your Star Wars or Indiana Joneses against 33 increasingly enervating MCU installments, 12 Fast & Furious skid marks, and three—three!—Trolls.) That three-minute preview, with its shaggy, toodling soundtrack, freeze frames, and old-timey Trailer Man voiceover, seemed to tap into a deeper vein of nostalgia than perhaps its distributor, Focus Features, could have guessed. In three months, it has racked up more than 15 million views on YouTube. The movie itself comes steeped in boldfaced vintage signifiers from the jump, literally; Payne renders the copyright notice and various production credits in bygone fonts of long ago, shot on crackling film stock. The effect is immediate and startlingly immersive. |
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REI Sells Incredible Adventure Packages |
The co-op has a new(ish) wing of its operation that plays full-on travel agency and guide service. The trips are U.S. only, but instead of calling guides in middle-of-fucking-nowhere Tennessee and comparing rates, REI does it all for you. Buy a package, and your entire adventure is set up—all you have to do is get to the meeting point.
The prices are also incredibly reasonable, given how much easier it is to book this way. And if you're a member (which only involves a one-time $30 payment ) there's even further discounts. Experience shopping is the way to go. Get one for yourself instead of Black Friday shopping, or hey, these obviously make great holiday gifts.
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You Can Now Buy a Grateful Dead Bong, and Life Is Complete |
There's always a moment of electric bonding when, decades after the fact, two people realize they were at the same show. This happened recently when I was speaking with Mark Pinkus, the affable president of Rhino Records who's also in charge of the entire US catalog for the Warner Music Group as well as Grateful Dead Properties. "July 13, 1984," he told me within three minutes of meeting him. "At the Greek. That was my first show. The encore was 'Dark Star.' I saw 73 shows and I never got another one." I'd been there, too, and it turns out that, nearly 40 years later, we'd also both seen the same Boulder shows this summer. I was talking to Pinkus because he oversees, among many other things, the Dead's brand extensions and there's a new extension dropping in November that I found intriguing. The Dead have popped their logo on a wide range of products over the years; on their site, Dead.net, a Head can find everything from dancing bear PJs to a branded "Igloo Steal Your Face Playmate Pal 7 Qt. Cooler" to tarot cards to a "cosmic mushroom foraging tool." But the newest brand extension was unique and a first of its kind: a bong. Or, as Pinkus refers to it, "a cannabis accessory." |
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Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author? |
In early August, after Andrew Lipstein published The Vegan, his sophomore novel, a handful of loved ones asked if he planned to quit his day job in product design at a large financial technology company. Despite having published two books with the prestigious literary imprint Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Lipstein didn't have any plans to quit; he considers product design to be his "career," and he wouldn't be able to support his growing family exclusively on the income from writing novels. "I feel disappointed having to tell people that because it sort of seems like a mark of success," he said. "If I'm not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don't know the reality of it, it seems like it's a failure in some way." The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature. The Writer makes coffee and sits down at their special writing desk for their ritualized morning pages. They break for lunch—or perhaps a morning constitution—during which they have an aha! moment about a troublesome plot point. Such a lifestyle aesthetic is "something we've long wanted to believe," said Paul Bogaards, the veteran book publicist who has worked with the likes of Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and Robert Caro. "For a very small subset of writers, this has been true. And it's getting harder and harder to do." |
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Wouldn't It Be Nice If We Could Predict the Political Future? |
My editor is a very nice person. My editor is also unfathomably cruel. A while back, she told me that this magazine would be celebrating its ninetieth birthday this autumn and, as part of the celebration, she would like me to write about what things might be like ninety years from now. Hello there, 2113. What's up? She had to be kidding. I couldn't write with any authority about what I think will happen next week, let alone 4,680 weeks from now. By Christmas, we might be watching Florida drown. By Easter, Vivek Ramaswamy might be rolling to victory on a platform drawn from old episodes of Drunk History. By this time next year, we might be preparing to reelect a vulgar talking yam, back this time with a vengeance. Hell, I told her, just buy a Ouija board. Cut up a goat on a sacred rock. Rent a crystal ball from some Deadhead. All I know for certain about the year 2113 is that I won't be around to see whatever happens. I'm not entirely sure I'm disappointed about that. |
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