Introducing the Awl Music App: Music Videos for and by People, Not Machines

Today, we launch Awl Music as an app on iTunes. You can watch your favorite music videos on your iPad, or throw them to your Apple TV like any other television channel. Get it here! Here's why we think this needs to exist.

My music video collection began in 1989, the year my family finally got MTV. Cable had been slow to arrive in the San Fernando Valley, and my family was not much for early adopting anything anyway. I had one previous experience with MTV, a few years earlier, when I spent two weeks of the summer in the basement of my aunt's house in Scarsdale, watching six hours a day of MTV with my cousin Stephen.

That was 1986, and it was was a phenomenal year for music. It was the year of Janet Jackson's Control, Peter Gabriel's So, The Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, Madonna's True Blue, Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, Run D.M.C.'s Raising Hell and The Pet Shop Boys's Please. Phil Collins was still releasing videos off of No Jacket Required, and he was still fronting Genesis for Invisible Touch. MTV played the videos from these albums with the frequency of propaganda, and they carved deep, deep pathways into my brain.

The video for "Sledgehammer" was the first time I was conscious of filmmaking technology. "Land of Confusion" was my first exposure to political satire. The strings at the beginning of "Papa Don't Preach," played over scenes of the Manhattan skyline, became indelibly associated with New York City. Things I adored for the rest of my life first came to my attention during those two weeks watching television in Scarsdale.

But by the time MTV came to my house in the Valley in 1989, all those music videos were off the air. Even at the age of twelve I had a sense of nostalgia, so I went on a mission to capture all the ones I associated with that summer. Whenever there was a "Top 100 Videos of All Time" weekend, I spent hours with my face a foot from the television, one finger on the VCR's record button. For good measure, I also grabbed new videos I liked, just in case they vanished, too.

I ultimately filled two VHS tapes, long-play setting, six hours each. I'm not sure I ever watched them. It just felt good to know I had that connection to 1986 if I needed it. Years later, the Internet came around, making this entire exercise pointless. The tapes no longer have any function (nor do I own a VCR), they just remind me that I once tried very hard to hold on to something ephemeral that was really important to me.

A number of people I grew up with had a relationship with music videos. We saw them the way we looked up to a cool older sibling we wanted to be like one day. Music videos defined our sense of fun. They provided some belonging to those who felt different. They presented us with attitudes to imitate. They had an effect, and we loved them.

It's with this in mind that The Awl began Awl Music, and today we re-platform site as an iPad app. You can watch it like a television channel if you also have Apple TV. The app is available right now on iTunes.

Awl Music is meant to emulate the MTV experience of thirty years ago. We have VJs just like MTV did back then, and these are people you already know. Dave Bry, Jeff Rosenthal, Sarah Johnson and David Shapiro'all friends of The Awl'are programming the channel. Awl Network editors like Alex, Choire, Edith and Adam will also contribute. There will be guest VJs like Emily Gould and her "Songs About Gossip" playlist, as well as crowdsourced selections like the "Summer Jams" playlist. Everyone who programs the channel has great taste. Each one has a different taste.

In some ways this is a reaction against the trend of algorithm-based discovery engines that permeate the Internet nowadays. Our VJs pick videos that resonate with them. We believe these videos are less likely to suck than the ones guessed at by lines of code. We're taking on the machines. The machines understand genre, they can detect syncopated rhythm, and they know what other videos people who watched one video also watched. But the machines don't understand meaning.

For the next week and a half, The Awl will be running a series by a few writers who know what it's like to find meaning in a music video. Specifically, we asked them to write about the first music video that meant something to them. If Awl Music can bring even a touch of experiences like theirs to your television set, we'll consider the whole enterprise a success.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

New York City, September 4, 2012

[No stars] The tattered, bloated remnants of someone else's weather. The hurricane was no longer a news item or an alarming form on the satellite photo, but a soggy influence. Stepping outside was suffocating, the feeling of putting previously worn socks back on after going barefoot. On the schoolyard playground, the fountain sprayed water upward and inward, ceaselessly splashing onto an inlaid map of the United States. Showers later on were inevitable and no more interesting than the rest of it.

The League of Ordinary Ladies: A Summer Reflection

Previously: Jobs and Juice.

Esther C. Werdiger made more totes!

One Trouble with Our "Pop Thinkers"

Here is the problem in a nutshell with the "idea fellows" of our time: consider this lengthy analysis of Whole Foods as a customer-centric institution, as a perfect example of "customer capitalism." (Not a terrifically good coinage, but hey, you pump out what you can while you're working on your TED talk.) Nowhere in this treatise does the fact appear that, um, one way Whole Foods interacts with capitalism and customers is that, while some prices make a lot of sense, SOME OTHER PRICES AT WHOLE FOODS ARE LITERALLY AS MUCH AS DOUBLE WHAT THEY ARE ELSEWHERE. And other prices are easily 30% to 50% more, for the same products available elsewhere. So yeah, you're buying that loaf of high protein organic "men's bread" for almost $9 at Whole Foods and the people who work there are fun and are super nice to you (and are also fairly well-paid, in the marketplace of "people working in stores"), but you can also go down to the hippie store (or the Fairway!) and buy it for $4-something. Hence, your analysis of capitalism is a failure because it does not actually consider the capitalism involved.

This Will Either Spoil Or Excite Your Appetite, Depending

If you'd like to see a list of stuntfoods where "a Whopper with five patties" represents the least extravagant concoction, head on over here.

New York City, September 2, 2012

'' Sun with clouds about to overtake it, alternating with clouds about to give way to sun. Proportions tipped to the cloudier side as the afternoon went on. It was gray outside the Battery Maritime Terminal and gray inside, under the cold light fixtures. The ferry yawed and pitched, turning for Governor's Island; the engine rattled skulls. The water was pewter. A brief drizzle fell on the island's perimeter road. A whole family, child after child after child, came veering up from behind on bicycles. The wobbliest child went a few more yards and wiped out sideways. The sun found the harbor and laid down a narrow line of brilliant silver, pointing away from the Statue of Liberty. Then it found the boxes of Lower Manhattan and did with them what it could. The line to get back to the ferry stayed overcast. Cotton candy turned to wool candy in the damp air, on its way to felt. Back up in the West 60s, an hour later, golden sun poured through. Beautiful conditions for an excursion.

Weather ratings range from zero to five stars.

How College Comedies Are Watched by All Ages of Dudes

"College is the best time of your life," is something people like to say and believe. It's also something that self-perpetuates itself: you approach college with that special time of your life vigor and demand nothing less. Accordingly, it's the college comedy film's obligation to capture this ethos from all angles: those looking forward to college, those in college, and those looking back at college.

Animal House came out on DVD around the time I was applying for colleges. My dad swiftly purchased it for me with the advice of "you should watch this before you go to college." I am not unique in this; dads were buying their sons Animal House VHSs for years and will eventually buy them Animal House 3-D blu-rays for years to come. Animal House and other college comedy films can show you what college will be like or, at least, show you what everyone else will think college will be like. They also give you something to look forward to, to study for the SATs for. More specifically they seem to exist to answer one question: Will I get to see boobs in college? And the answer based on every single college comedy is a resounding "Yes!" There are more boobs in these movies than there are blackboards, which is reasonable since the vast majority of college comedies speak much more to the male collegiate ideal than the female. In these movies, women are objects either to be ogled at or won over by the charming protagonist (or if they're really lucky, they get to be just housewives who stay at home taking blowjob classes). It's unfortunate; however, these pictures are geared towards the adolescent and the adolescent at heart, and that viewer wants to believe college is the time when they'll see the most boobs possible.

For those in college it's less about the aspiration of seeing the boobs, it's about how will they see boobs. To those inclined, these movies become instructional. For example:

Luckily this hasn't grown to become common practice. But this has:

Toga Parties date back to the 1950s but Animal House is credited for making them as an essential part of the college experience as sodium-based diets and too infrequently washed bed sheets. Where a disco party nowadays would be thrown with irony and intentional misrepresentation, kids continue to throw Toga Parties in earnest. Still, more than these explicit examples, these college comedies provide a guide to how college should feel. In these movies, college at its best is lived like there is a tomorrow and that tomorrow is going to be filled with not college and a job and drudgery. Vance "Van" Wilder, Jr. can't leave college because college is the only place where good things, college things can happen and he instructs others, namely Taj, how do follow suit. Similarly, it was Rodney Dangerfield's job in Back To School to teach his son the right way to be a college student, which mostly involves partying, talking back in class, and doing flippy dives into pools. Even Revenge of the Nerds doesn't aspire to offer an alternative vision of college but to assert that nerds too can have the same sort of drunken shenanigans as the muscular. For those in college, they can watch movies about college, regardless of how incredibly dated they are, and confirm they're doing it right.

Then that person graduates and that same movie reminds them that they did it right. The college comedy allows its post-college viewer to remember the time that was. Old School took this a step further and made the film about this nostalgia itself. Beyond its fratty set pieces, the film is about being able to relive the best time of your life. Sure, now they can afford to bring Snoop Dogg to a party but the result isn't so much different from when they were 20 and Doggystyle was playing over the boombox. This gets to the core of the revisionist history element to most college comedies. Partly, this is because every college comedy is written by someone who went to college and wanted to recreate their experience with a bit more pizazz and partly this is because college comedies can fill in some of the gaps in your partying memory. You might not have chugged a fifth of Jack but you totally know someone who did (so what if he was a fictional character). College comedies prey on the built-in feelings many have towards that time and they use that goodwill as a sort of workaround from having to ground the film emotionally. A generation's college comedy acts a supplement to a college photo album: "This is what my friends and I looked like and this movie shows how we felt and what we did and how often we saw girls' boobs."

And it all works because very generally college is the same for most viewers. There are tons of variables that can go into a college experience but it still is college, the time in your life when you are about 18-22 and live at a school surrounded by only people your age. The cut and dryness of the time period gives these movies an added bit of universality. Everyone has mid-20s and early-30s and etc. but it's pretty impossible to delineate them as completely. High school is similar to college in this way; however, because they characters are younger, it's a bit creepy to make them as lewd. College as a clear-cut time period becomes a thing; a thing teenagers can look forward to; a thing college students can inhabit; a thing parents could remember fondly to their kids. All college comedies draw from this and contribute to it. They are ways to experience THE "best time of your life" in perfect-90 minute bundles and see some boobs in the process.

Return To Cat Town

Previously: Fly Fishing The Universe

Amy Jean Porter is an artist who lives in the woods of Connecticut.

New York City, August 30, 2012

'''' Bright again. The trigeminal nerve, jolted by reflecting light and a new stick of gum, fired off the morning sneeze a few steps earlier than usual. The sun found its way under the perpetually dim, dank scaffolding on 67th Street and was caught in the netting there. For once, there was no smell of dog urine. By afternoon, the sparkling sky had gone duller and quartzy. It took a while, out in the day, to shake off the nasty bone-chill of the air conditioning.

MBGATE 10

It seems hard to believe, but this weekend marks the tenth anniversary of Mastered by Guy at The Exchange, the absolutely remarkable Max Tundra record that was hailed at its release for having "more ideas per minute than most' contemporaries can manage over the course of a career." I'm not sure that there are any other records from 2002 that I'm still hearing new notes on, particularly those that are less than 40 minutes long, but I continue to find things on this one all the time. If you've never listened to it before I am in total envy of you, because hearing it for the first time is going to be such an incredible experience. Go to it!

The Republican National Convention

On Monday morning in Tampa, I stepped out of a bathroom stall and into a large bald fellow in a blue suit. I didn't even have time to wash my hands before saying good morning to the most important Republican of our time, and my personal hero, Mr. Karl Rove. "Morning," I said. "Morning," he said. It's morning in America, again. And then walking out of the bathroom, I saw a grown, suit-clad man trying to mount a five-foot tall red, white and blue raffle-prize elephant. "Get a picture!" the guy yelled to no one.

The Marriott Waterside Hotel was Fort Romney RNC. The Marriott family are Mormon, are big Romney donors, and are responsible for Mitt's first name, so this location next to The Tampa Bay Times Forum was a blessing.

The entire city was cast under cobalt hurricaney sky, rain storms blowing along through wet 90-degree air. Downtown Tampa was fenced off with checkpoints at major intersection, with all the businesses closed, and between the security lockdown and the dark of day, it felt like a cliche end-of-the-world film.

Then there were all these cops riding shitty bikes around. Up the street from the Marriott, a hundred or so Occupy people faced off with these cops, their bikes handily creating a wall. Behind them were several lines of gleaming port-o-johns. Anarchists were arguing with cops over some rights. "We want bathrooms! We want water! These are our streets!" they chanted. Occupy won the standoff, and were pleased. "We told that cop what's up. Now we get water and shitters," a young man in a Chili Peppers t-shirt, who gave his name as Thor, told me.

I investigated the bathrooms. They had a fine and clean aroma. Same can't be said of the anarcho-brosef who charged up to me a few minutes later, looked down at my press credentials, and said, "The media lies, man."

Tampa was occupied in more of a West Bank or Green Zone sense than in a Zuccotti Park way. The protests were much tamer than what we saw in New York 2004, when a million people marched against Bush and more than 1800 were arrested. In 2008, St. Paul erupted on day one with a running riot, a cop-dodging battle that lasted hours, involving tear gas and rubber bullets, with windows broken and cars flipped and smashed, with hundreds detained, journalists included. In Tampa there was one arrest: a guy had refused to take off his black bandana. Doesn't seem like it was worth the $50 million in tax dollars spent on security for that guy.

With the Convention canceled Monday, at least there were parties to attend. Most looked bad, and were bad, but not the Zen party hosted by the Log Cabin Republicans. The old-school gay Republican group had an afternoon event at Oystercatchers, a beautiful seafood restaurant on the water. Well-groomed men flirted and politicked over excellent food. This year's gay GOP all seemed to like Romney, who'd been a reasonably fair supporter of gay rights over the years. But no one I spoke to privately was happy that the party was moving even further to the right.

Only the Washington Post could possibly make a Republican Convention nerdier than it already is. They hosted a trivia happy hour at a corny theme BBQ restaurant. At least it came with free drinks. Political reporter Chris Cilliza asked obscure questions'who was House leader in 1983, and what is the next Resident Evil movie going to be called? Chuck Todd came in and hugged a bunch of pretty young NBC girls. He's not the best-looking dude but he is the Ryan Gosling of political reporters. The Post's party drove us across the street to the Tampa Aquarium for the booze lobby's party.

The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States is the largest liquor lobby in America and their party is always a Convention highlight. They hired mermaids to swim with sharks in the aquarium.

They made ice-sculpted Patron bottles. It was awesome. Mist machines made the cave-like aquarium extra-trippy and all the shuffling, wasted blue blazer-clad men stumbling past a tank where a 1000-pound grouper lurked immobile was surreal.

On Day Two, I hit Fort Romney Tuesday. The Marriott lobby is like a Greek take on a Florida Jewish retiree condo, with 40-foot ceilings, oversized columns, cheesy mirrors, gaudy lighting and furniture, with giant windows looking at giant boats docked out back.

The room's dimensions did Chris Christie no favors. I confronted the sweaty Oompa Loompa from New Jersey.

"You bummed about losing the Nets to a rapper?" I shouted. No answer.

An hour later, I found him again. "You bummed about the Nets?"

A skinny kid in a poorly fitted suit, some Christie handler, yelled back at me: "That's a stupid question."

"I'm playing insider baseball, asshole!" I said. We yelled comforting vulgarities at each other for another few minutes before he ran back to his boss.

Then there was Matt Romney standing alone in the lobby! (*Squee!*) Of the boyband that is the five Romney brothers, Matt's the sexy mature one to Tagg's cute one. I stiff-armed a New York Times reporter to get at him.

"Sox fan, Matt?"

"Yes, I am."

"Whatchya think of the trade, guy?"

Thoughtful pause. "I'm still not sure. It was bold but I'm gonna miss A Gonz." (Adrián González was traded along with several other Boston Red Sox starters to the L.A. Dodgers last week.) "He's my man."

Matt's dad had just arrived at the airport and the motorcade was en route. In a cab about five miles from the Marriott the convoy zipped past'police motorcycles, black SUVS, cop cars'about thirty vehicles in a totally POTUS-style motorcade.

Each state's delegates stay at different hotels, maybe around three delegations per hotel, probably spread across twenty in all. All logistics are organized by the Republican National Committee based on, what else, politics. Romney's home state of Massachusetts got to stay at the Marriott. Florida and South Carolina, who pissed off the RNC by moving their primaries up, were exiled 30 miles away in a suburb.

The Nevada delegation were staying at the DoubleTree, a mid-range spot which I figured indicated the swing state was important, but not that important, to the RNC. They lined up for a bus to the convention, snaking through the lobby. I observed the presence of a statistically anomalous amount of breast implants.

Kenny Bent, a Ron Paul delegate, did not have fake breasts. He was also not rich, nor was he going to vote for Romney. He has whirly hair, bundled in a ponytail, poor dental hygiene and he hates Mitt Romney. "I'm not voting for him," he said. "There's no difference between Mitt and Obama." This was a common saying among a set of delegates, mainly the Ron Paul and Tea Party folks. "Not since 1976 has the Republican Party been so divided," Mr. Bent said.

The GOP's rifts are largely economic. Actual members of Ron Paul's Liberty Movement and the Tea Party are drawn from the middle class and are actually concerned with growing inequality. The Republican party establishment skews towards rich folk and runs on corporate cash. It's often a class thing. Also, rifts aside, this year's GOP might be the dumbest political party in postwar American history. Many of their core policies don't even make sense. And then, Paul supporters are isolationists. When pressed about what to do about, say, NATO, the little treaty thingy we help fund that protects Western Europe from evildoers, there is no good answer. "Let the Europeans police their backyard," Mr. Bent said. Last time we tried that, it went very poorly. But there is common ground. Tea Partiers and Paul Ryan-style deficit hawks are somehow fiscal conservatives who want to cut government spending but not defense spending, which approaches a trillion dollars a year of the $3.6 trillion budget.

So when Nevada walked onto the floor of the Convention, things felt unusually tense for what's usually a flag-waving conservative love fest. The Paul delegates were booing and yelling and chanting. But dissent was even found in Mitt's home state delegation of Massachusetts. One 29-year-old delegate said the same things as Nevada's Bent: the GOP and Dems both were controlled by corporations and the rich and he wouldn't vote for Mitt.

But yes: mostly there were happy Republicans. Obviously, the only delegation to have a uniform were the Texans: a Lone Star flag shirt and a cowboy hat. Kansas dressed the most baffling and creatively, with everyone representing their state's various sports teams. One man was attired as a University of Kansas Jayhawk stuffed animal.

It's always fun to be at a government event at which a majority of attendees say the biggest threat to nation is government. It's even funnier that they say this at the Forum's Official Romney-Ryan store, with hundreds of products, buying government propaganda.

David Carr wrote in the Times on Monday that the RNC needs a dose of reality TV. But the Convention is much more interesting than any reality TV show (except "Love and Hip Hop"). The 15,000 journalists covering the Convention, however, are mostly boring nerds. The media center sprawled hundreds of thousands of square feet. Every few feet you could see another square J-schooler. The vast majority were white people dressed in boring D.C. style, covering boring white D.C. politicos. Uninteresting people make a scripted event like this even less interesting.

Some of the best journalists weren't even on site. Christopher Morris, one of the most talented photographers alive, was shooting a fashion feature with a model dressed as a Southern Belle in front of cops in riot gear'police state chic. And some British reporters spent the days sleeping so they can cover the entire night.

There were virtually no American journalists at the opening of New York nightclub 1-OAK's pop-up in a 20,000-square-foot tent next to the RNC. Americans would love to have seen washed-up rockers Sugar Ray and crazy cat Juliette Lewis singing for Camp Freddy, a hard rock cover band made up of dudes who were like in Billy Idol's band. Drummer Matt Sorum, of The Cult and GNR, laughed when asked about the crowd. "I just hope more people show up. These people don't seem too rock 'n' roll," he said. But by 1 a.m., the funniest concert in America was taking place. A band of aging hair metal dudes playing cover songs to D.C. nerds is a recipe for awesome times, and the crowd was dancing and singing along.

Wednesday was all about Paul Ryan. No one was talking about anything but Paul Ryan, his speech, his abs, his piercing eyes, his bizarre politics'. But after Ryan's speech, came the the private party John Boehner's been doing since 1996. He rents out a big space for four nights, decorates it (this time like a pirate ship meets a carnival, complete with a boat stage and moving carousel bar, and someone picks up the tab.

This year he had the Soul Survivors play a short set that included Rihanna covers, with some white guy doing the Pitbull verses.

There were a thousand young Republicans, the men all dressed the exact same. Susan Glickman, an energy consultant, was confused. "Every guy here is gay," she said. How do you know? "I asked every woman here and they all agreed. Look around," she said.

The night before the nominee's speech is usually a long one. On Thursday morning Tampa looked evacuated. People were resting and recovering for Mitt's big speech.

By late afternoon, the pomp of the closing night was ramping up. Men wore their best suits with some form patriotic flair, often a flag of some kind. Women wore a rainbow of dresses, but red was the most prominent. Bleach-blond hair the most likely accessory.

The program began at 7 p.m. and a whole lot of weird people spoke and I don't remember any of them except Clint Eastwood who sounded like he was gonna die on stage and spoke to an empty stool. By the time Marco Rubio was introducing Romney, the floor was excited that a person who had something at stake was about to give a consequential speech.

Romney received a warmer welcome than McCain four years ago. He then lit up a speech that outdid any expectations. Over thirty minutes, Mitt hit all the right notes'family, hard work, experience. He also picked a fight with Putin, weirdly, but I give him credit because Putin's a judo champ. Mitt was smart to appeal directly to let down Obamans. And he mostly stayed away from social issues.

There were more parties after. But nothing could close a week that began with Ron Paul people chanting about returning to the gold standard better than global capitalism's finest specimens getting a return on their donations to Mitt Romney in the form of a soft-rock hotel ballroom mixer.

Many of the big donors, the muscle behind the GOP, attended a Victory Party at, of course, the Marriott. Don Felder from the Eagles played. A few hundred rich white people drank cocktails with names like Obama Blues and Red State Rout. The mood was confident. A TV weatherman, Tim Kelley, assured me Mitt was gonna win. "Just the money in this room is enough to outspend Obama," he said. "All that matters is TV commercials. And we have much more money for that than they do."

Ray LeMoine lives in Darien, Southampton and Palm Beach.

Unraveling Midtown's Salad Pricing Conspiracy

In Midtown Manhattan, the streets are paved with Make Your Own Salad cafes. A delicious and affordable lunch option, you might think. Seven Different Iterations of Cubed Chicken, pile it on. All of the cheese, gimme. (Avoid the avocado, it's priced like albino Russian sturgeon egg$.)

But in Midtown, no matter how big the '$7.00 for any toppings you want!' sign is, they always turn out to be at least $10. WHY, HOW. What am I doing wrong here?  When I first moved to New York my higher-up coworkers asked me for my main impression of the big city. There was only one thing to say: 'The salads! They're like $10!' They did not understand why that was a Thing for me, but they were also not working for an entry-level hourly wage (which, by the way, came out to about three avocados per hour). I have been here one year, and the $10 salad continues to throw me for a loop. Midtown salads: Why so pricey? SOME THEORIES.

1.  The salads' proximity to such hallowed New York City landmarks as The Chrysler Building, The Empire State Building, and the Seizure-Inducing Toys'R'Us in Times Square. Is there a FUN TAX added to all consumables purchased here?

2.  Tortilla strips!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 

3. The price of the 'GRAB 1 FREE THING OF THESE BAGEL CHIPS WE MAKE OUT OF STALE AND OVERCOOKED BAGELS' bin that sits beside the cash register must be built into the salad costs. There's no way anything so nice as bagel chips could just be given away for free! Especially in NEW YORK, where all other variations of crunchy carbohydrate cost $3 or more!

4. One might argue that the health benefits of scarfing down a bowl of raw vegetables for lunch would be worth the high price tag. These benefits are negated by the part where the guy asks me what I want in my salad and I go, 'Cheddar, Mozzerella, Eggs, Pasta, Fried Chicken, Ranch. Oh! And a donut! Yeah, man! Throw that donut in there! Tortilla strips.'

5.  I literally don't know. I don't know why salads cost so much money! Does anyone know? People who don't live in NYC? Salad costs? How are those in the midwest? The plains? What's a salad going for in Seattle? I still have no idea where Ohio is on a map. How much for salads there?

6. Novelty tax for the memories of hangin' with your study group in the student union during college where Make Your Own Salad bar was a daily ritual and you paid for it with fake money that came out of a card that your parents remotely refilled while loving you unfailingly.

 

Lauren Rodrigue lives in Brooklyn. PHOTO MONTAGE of WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD courtesy THE HAIRPIN.

Eat Up, You're Going To Die Either Way

Calorie restriction does not appear to extend lifespan, and even if it did why the hell would you want it to? Life sucks already, you're gonna suffer though MORE of it while starving yourself at the same time? Idiots.

A Conversation With D.T. Max About His New David Foster Wallace Biography

In 2009, D.T. Max published a long piece about David Foster Wallace, and his suicide, in The New Yorker. The project grew into the biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. In the final months of the book's completion, through a stroke of incredible luck, I had the opportunity to help Max as a research assistant. Biography, it turns out, is complicated, wrenching work, particularly when your subject inspires the kind of devotion Wallace can, and where the end of a life comes in the form his did. With the book's release today, I wanted to talk to Max about the process that went into its research and writing. Granted, it's a strange thing to be interviewed by someone with whom you've worked for several months already'but he was willing, and over the past few days, we had this exchange by email.

Michelle Dean: The act of biography is obviously an enormous commitment to another person's life, whether the terms are temporal or emotional or just sheer intellectual stamina. How did you end up undertaking that commitment here?

D.T. Max: I had no idea how hard biography was, especially a first biography of someone. I'd never done one before. I guess I just thought you asked people where someone was and what they were doing and you stuck it on note-cards, then you strung the parts together, à la Richard Ellmann. Definitely not the case, at least not with David. The first step was just the beginning of a very long slippery process. But, then, think about auto-biography? Do you remember where you were in May 1989? Or June 2001? And if you don't care enough about yourself to remember that, why would anyone else? You don't have to be a writer to have this experience, one that for me really reads as challenge, the ultimate challenge before the writer. How do I prevent you from disappearing into the past? Slipping into oblivion? Growing ghostly?

Right, but often biographers get misty-eyed in retrospect about how the subject "chose them" or what-have-you. Did you come to feel that way at all? I mean, it's obvious that the biography was an outgrowth of the 2009 New Yorker essay you wrote, but beyond that.

The New Yorker piece was 10,000 words long and I'm sure it felt like an eternity to most writers and readers of magazine articles, but I felt I had elided over the problems, not gone deep enough. It seemed to me that there was a lot of unprocessed information in it. When I was done most of David's life was only a little less spectral than when I began. I felt, for instance, I did a particularly cursory job on what would later turn out to be a fascinating time, Arizona, where he wrote Girl with Curious Hair. I just didn't understand that time at all.

I felt a calling to do this, you know, and it was a calling that grew.

From outside too, I imagine?

There was this communal grief over David's death that at least for me was eye-opening: the posts from people comparing his death to that of John Lennon, people speaking about the world as a scarier place without him. It started just after he died and kept growing and growing. It's still growing.

Look, David was special and the purity of his commitment to his readers and his interest in their well-being was seductive'I saw this more and more and kept thinking about a more ample way to respond to this as a writer'that insistence that what he wanted to do was show what it was to be a "fucking human being." If he wanted to show what it was to be a fucking human being, could I return the compliment?

But, you know, his is a terribly sad story too and if anything led me to hesitate it was that sadness. I took an oath at the beginning to make the book happier than the article, to catch the joy that kept breaking through. I don't know if I succeeded.

It's odd. As this project progressed, and the further I got into research, the more surprised I felt at all the trouble in his life. On some level, the cliché goes, it was all in those books, it was all there, but those books are joyful, too.

David lived his life mostly indoors and in his head. He starts out a boy in central Illinois, goes to Amherst College, does his graduate work at the University of Arizona, teaches briefly back at Amherst and Arizona, then home to eastern Illinois, becomes a graduate student at Harvard, enters a halfway house, winds up in Syracuse, back to Illinois to teach and then finally Pomona College near Los Angeles, to the end we all know.

Maybe because he was so anxious he also had one of the most routinized lives you can imagine. He eats the same breakfast, goes to the same twelve-step meeting, works out with the same weights day after day. Yet in these humdrum stats'little different from those of any academic gypsy'is an immensity of feeling, living, and a great deal of suffering. The breakdowns, the suicide attempts, the triumph of Infinite Jest. How do you write about such a narrow but intensely lived life? How do you reveal the multitudes contained in the little rooms in which he lived? For a biographer it's a challenge. When you get to the tradecraft of writing there are always strange allurements, inducements that would make most people shrug and say, why did that interest him? Among other things I wanted to capture the life of a late 20th-century middle-class American of my own age with roughly my own interests. We were both into Alanis Morissette at the same time though only he had a poster of her on his wall.

And in biography, you can use either a wide net or a narrow one. The dilemma was often how much you wanted to include. Too much and these things can become a kitchen sink (particularly when your subject wrote an 1100-page book himself); too little and you risk oversimplification. And you had over 850 pages of letters, nevermind the interviews and the drafts' Is there anything you're willing to share here that you ended up cutting but just as easily could have gone in?

I drew the lines often and maybe a little arbitrarily. If it didn't interest me it didn't go in. In that sense I was slightly outside the usual style of biography. But there are things that haunt me that got left out and phrases that bounce around in my head. One was about David and his dogs. I thought a lot about why he had usually two oversized, undertrained dogs tearing up his living room and scaring anyone who came to the door. And at one point when he received a bad review, he shrugged it off, writing to one of his editors that his dogs didn't care so why should he. Another time he says he won't go see Gwyneth Paltrow in Great Expectations because she looks like the 'ghost of a horse.' I thought that was pretty brilliant.

Ha! It's true those funny little observations stick with you, I find myself stealing them. Sometimes the sadness crept in through the crevices of the process, though, because most of the people who knew David, in large ways and small, were still around, and still living it out, don't you think?

Absolutely. David left a lot of grief'grief in his family, on the part of his wife, his friends. I know grief firsthand'I lost both my parents relatively young. And so I know that grief has a number of sides'part of grieving is sometimes narrating, telling before it's forgotten. Grief can also circle back and grab a person a second time, a third time. Researching a book like this does not take you on a linear path. You aren't writing about Thomas Hardy or Plotinus. You're writing about someone people knew and loved just a few years ago. My approach was if you didn't want to see me you didn't have to, but in the end nearly everyone did want to. It's a process, interviewing the grieving, putting yourself forward when it's propitious and knowing when to back off. You think as a journalist: oh, go in there and ask for what you want, but that's wrong. Journalists forget'read David's Kenyon College speech and it will help you remember'that other people have lives that are at least as vivid to them as yours is to you. You have to respect this reality; in fact genuflect to it. What I'm talking about is not a technique; it's a way of being alive that extends into your work. You sometimes you get better results than if you were a ramrod, sometimes you don't, but in any event if you do it for the results you won't get them. One former lover brought me a shirt of his she had saved. Another friend gave me the audio letters they had exchanged just after college. To hear David's voice, so full of youth and excitement, that was priceless. You think you know but when you hear that, you do know.

It was often hard, though as the years slipped by it became easier. David's story in the broadest sense is still in play for the people who knew him. The book is the product of interviews and email exchanges with, probably, 200 people. They were his family, his wife, his teachers, the students he taught, the women he dated, the boys he played tennis with in high school and even the video clerk from whom he rented movies. David didn't just brush against people. He tried to inhabit their minds on some level'and then he left. Suicide is the ultimate withholding gesture'I'm going to withhold myself from you. And because of his abrupt end, all these people are still trying to reconcile the person they knew with the ending they know. And with Every Love Story published, they are also now trying to reconcile it with the story I tell.

In some sense, though, you were also triangulating between the people who knew him in this world and the people who knew him through the work. Which can be tricky at times, it seemed to me. Did you ever think so?

Well, David, maybe even more than other writers, created a fictional self. And to complicate things, he sort of had one fictional self for his fiction and another for his nonfiction and then a third for his letters. "You can see how fraught and charged all this going to get," as David wrote in "Tense Present." The accounts often don't agree with one another.

The David of the letters, yes, often felt the easiest to access and trust. And I mean, you had so many.

The letters are glorious. Weird. Unsettling. I have about 750 pages of letters.

850, I just checked.

Okay, then 850 pages of letters that he sent to various people'lovers, friends, his twelve-step program sponsor, editors and fellow writers. I would sometimes sit in my office at night and look at the piles of them and think how lucky I was to have this quasi-narrative of his life, beginning when he is in graduate school and ending just a few months before his death. The weirdness of the letters, though, is you have the ones he sent'because people kept them'but you don't have the ones sent to him. He seems to have kept almost nothing. I felt the letters calling out to me so strongly that sometimes late at night I would close the door to my office to quiet their voices. The effect was, well, ghostly, all his unanswered declarations of his being. Sometimes I felt like Bartleby.

But since the biographer's job is to at least highlight the distinctions between those selves, if not sort of offer a verdict as to which one was "truest," doesn't that leave you in a bit of a bind?

Yes! Which is appropriate when writing about the original double-bind man, David.

Describe what you mean, by "double-bind man"?

A double bind is an unresolvable dilemma and in David's cosmology, they were the most frightening of all dead-ends because they brought with them no rest. You bounced endlessly between two possibilities, two courses of action. Hamlet-like you can't make up your mind, Dante-like you are perpetually whirling around some upper circle of hell.

Practically speaking, one of the great struggles was to figure out what really happened or at least get close to it. David was writing his autobiography even as he was living it and the life and the narrative coincided but were not identical. Take an example. David used to tell people he sold thesis help for pot or money at Amherst. He even has his doppel do it in The Pale King and Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman, something of a stand-in for David, does it in The Broom of the System. David was one of the smartest people anyone ever met in their lives'everyone agrees on that'so it's obvious that in philosophy or English, and probably history or French or economics, all subjects he got A-pluses in'he could have done it. Anyone would have been smart to make that trade with him. But did it ever happen? His college roommate and confidante Mark Costello, the one who knew him best in those years, thinks not. He thinks it's David's self-mythologizing. I never found anyone on the receiving end of such a transaction or had direct knowledge of one, so it's not in the book. If I were writing a novel with David as the protagonist, it would certainly be something the character did. It's something he should have done if he didn't.

In David's own case it always struck me as going beyond the double, too. His thinking was so recursive that he would double-back on himself more than twice. I think of in the letters'and there are several instances of this'where he's talking about what he called 'his Statue,' a public image that he has a love-hate relationship with.

It's certainly true that David found double binds where others mightn't. It's part of his radical distrust of the stability of the world, the same impulse that yields the stories in Brief Interviews illustrating "the porousness of certain borders" and, for that matter, his undergraduate thesis, a refutation of a philosopher named Richard Taylor, where he tries to reassure himself that the future is not pre-ordained but just as we were taught as kids, up to us. How much, sometimes, though, he wished it was less up to him!

Well, that's a very high-minded way to put it, yes. But was it so abstract for him, I wonder? Another interpretation might be to just call it anxiety, or depression.

I think it's more the price of having a Ferrari of a mind. It's hard to handle but it goes fast.

No one answer, I suppose.

But I think you'd have to say that both are valid. There are no simple explanations for lives, least of all David's.

Related: Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter.

We're All Gonna Fry

Somewhere at the heart of my Venn diagram delineating the concurrence of disgust and desire you'll find at least four of these items. Coronary City, here I come!

Men Sad

"Maybe men are happier before adolescence because their testosterone levels are lower."
'Why are women happier than men? Before all you broads jump in to start telling me that they're not, let me just alert you that Science is on the case and has discovered that "low expression of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women" and that testosterone "may cancel out the positive effect of MAOA on happiness in men." So the next time you see a happy little boy running down the street or playing in the park, remind yourself that soon enough he will be a sad and sullen adult male whose joys are too briefly taken and whose sorrows are always present but rarely spoken, filling him with a shame he can't quite understand. I bet that makes you ladies super-happy, doesn't it?

Photo by Robert Kneschke, via Shutterstock

Shaving: What's It All About?

I recently started shaving with a double-edge safety razor and it has CHANGED MY LIFE. Seriously, if I somehow manage to get the procedure down to the point where my shaky, hungover morning hands don't put me at serious risk of accidental throat-slittery I feel like everything is going to be fine from now on. (Shaving-wise, I mean. The rest of my existence will remain a continuing state of suffering through the inevitable trudge to the tomb.) My face has not been this smooth since I hit puberty, and not having to take out a loan each time I need to buy new blades means more money to spend on cigarettes and alcohol! Anyway, here's a whole bunch of stuff about shaving that may or may not be of interest to you.

Twenty-Seven

Part of a series about youth.

When you turn twenty-seven you start noticing the number, everywhere. Suddenly everyone else is twenty-seven, too: Every athlete and actor, all of the dead people who ever did anything. Your age is everywhere because you, at twenty-seven, are perfect. Just there. Just where you are right now: educated, but no longer preachy; fuckable, without being whiny; mature, and not yet fat. Never change.

At least, that's what you feel like America keeps telling you.

An old Esquire article, randomly stumbled across, only confirms that you weren't imagining things. This ode to "The 27-Year-Old Woman" is a love-letter to your agesake, half lust and half lecture, written waaaaaay back in 1999: "They are all twenty-seven' They always were twenty-seven, and they always will be, at the moment they are both young enough and old enough to teach you the meaning of heartbreak'" It goes on to list all the twenty-seven-year-olds who ever charmed.

Because yes, everything America mythicizes and celebrates and destroys is twenty-seven and has always been twenty-seven: Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca; Heather Graham, in Boogie Nights; Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes; Jemima Kirke, in "Girls"; and every other actress expected to be a sexual prize for the first 89 minutes and believably settled down in the final frame.

The twenty-seven-year-old can accomplish anything: Yuri Gagarin orbited at age 27; Flannery O'Connor published Wise Blood and Hemingway The Sun Also Rises'their debuts. Think of Ryan Lochte v. Michael Phelps just last month when both were 27, or LeBron James, 27. This is the year at which baseball players ripen, like cantaloupes, their desirability on fantasy rosters spiking (think Matt Kemp, Prince Fielder). And it's not because they're so good (Delmon Young, 27) but because next season, they
settle in; because twenty-seven's home runs and "Play-it-Again-Sams" wax into twenty-eight's solid OBPs and loveless marriages.

At least that's what Julia Roberts' character thinks in My Best Friend's Wedding, which is predicated on two friends promising that if they are not engaged to others by twenty-eight, they'll marry. I watched it while eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's (founded by two twenty-seven-year-olds) and wept: twenty-seven is the last year of romance, ego, mania. It's the last year of Bold Moves. It's the age of the real man of the hour, Christian Grey, who at twenty-seven jumps out of the playpen and into the arms of boring Anastasia. How mature.

And so of course that's why at twenty-seven our musicians sign up for the "27 Club": Winehouse, Cobain, Robert Johnson' Because if you listen to the culture, twenty-seven is where you are most beautiful and where you destroy yourself; it is for Physical Peaks and Physical Destruction, it is for Olympic Lap Lanes and Public Funerals.

***

But maybe there's nothing there. Maybe you're only noticing this because at twenty-seven you've hit your egomaniacal peak'you've "found yourself" (Katie Holmes, Scientology conversion at 27) and you see yourself everywhere. Maybe like the fictional Christian Grey you are turning over a new leaf, or like Ryan Lochte you are finally doing the thing you trained for, or, like Carey Mulligan (27), you are finally starring in the adaptation of a novel written by a twenty-seven-year-old (Fitzgerald, 1923).

But then again Esquire saw it too and tried to figure out why the twenty-seven-year-old is so gosh darn enchanting:

"They are old enough to be haunted, at twenty-seven, and thus old enough to be haunting' They've got you cornered, at twenty-seven. They are inescapable and inevitable and their enigma is everywhere you look for it, and Mona Lisa'who was twenty-seven when she was the Mona Lisa'smiles for all of them, when she makes you think she is smiling just for you.

Someone tell the Hearst fact-checkers that they might have been a few years off with this whole sexy enigma thing. At twenty-seven a woman is not at her sexual peak. (That comes later, in her thirties.) And she's certainly not at her happiest and most self-assured'science informs us that's at 33. But to each her own, really. These are just averages, just surveys, just polls and data.

After all, twenty-seven is just a number. It's the atomic number of cobalt, the number of countries in the E.U., the age at which The Elephant Man died. It's the number of bones in the human hand. It's the age of Dave Franco.

***

Twenty-seven is not a romantic blur, from up close. It's a hard year. It's the year my painter friend was rejected from art school, the year my beloved cousin called "tough' the end of the floaty years," the year my calm, clear-headed graphic-designer pal changed boyfriends, cities, occupations. She, of all people chalked it up to astrology, to Saturn's Return.

The astrologists have it that at twenty-seven, Saturn has nearly completed its 29.5 year cycle around the planets, to re-enter the zodiac sign you were born under. He opens a door to what the stargazers call the "Phase of Maturity."

Saturn is figured as Father Time, a Grim Reaper. He takes your youth, and he crushes it. He is the god who killed all of his children. He is called "The Killing Planet." And he tells you, quoting Rilke, "You Must Change Your Life."

My painter friend said, "Fuck graduate school." She rented a beautiful studio. She plans to do the work, on her own.

***

When I turned twenty-seven I was at my five-year college reunion, in a sweaty sea of twenty-seven-year-olds, whose lives were somewhere between having graduated from Yale (fancy!) and trying to plug their iPhones into power outlets that the DJ wasn't using (disorganized!). We were a mess. It had rained and everyone's hair looked terrible. We stuffed our bags with free Snapple.

A friend and I wandered the other reunion tents, trying to ascertain what our lives would be like in five years, ten years, fifteen'and whether we would then be served better cheese plates. The tenth-year reunion was dressed well, hair done, shoes polished. They looked rich and serene, in three-piece suits with kickass baby carriages. At the fiftieth, I bumped into a woman in a Burberry trench, her nails slick and scarlet'"Excuse me," she said, eyes alight beneath a coif of white hair. Her nametag read, "Kitty." Moved by her glamour, I said, to no one: "I no longer fear the future." I would age and buy a great coat, coin a nickname, become myself.

At twenty-seven, everything before you is clean and solid and everything behind you is a bottle of Strawberry Kiwi Snapple, stuffed with cigarette butts.

At twenty-seven, I am between youth and maturity, between wanting to save myself and wanting to destroy myself. I weep during lotion commercials and laugh when I skin a knee. I bike without a helmet and I have Cadillac health insurance. I smoke pot and teach college classes. This year, I slept with the ex I pined for; last month I slept with a clerk I met at a camping supply store. Saturday I went to a cocktail party with MBA students, then left for a bar called Grumpy's. At one a.m., I ate tater tots. At two p.m., I went to yoga. I am no longer afraid of rejection. I am terrified of black bears.

***

My mother has long said that twenty-seven was the happiest year of her life. So on Sunday I called her, pretending I was a concerned and mature twenty-eight-year-old who wanted to check in. Really, I was calling her like a twenty-six-year-old'to ask her to help me with my project. Did she remember what it was about being twenty-seven that was so great?

Well, she was out of graduate school by then. She knew who she was. There was a euphoria of knowing what the world held. And there was a potential to do anything. She knew who she was and what she wanted.

My father had his own theory. "Twenty-seven is the height of your personal identity. For some people, that's right before they marry or settle down'" He explained that when you begin to make mature choice'to stick to a job, to stick with a partner'you end up making compromises. Your identity shifts. At twenty-seven, you're free.

"Well. What did you actually do that year, that made it so great? That made you so happy?"

"Well," he says. "That's the year I met your mother."

***

The twenty-seven-year-old is supposed to settle down, like my father did.

But recently, I met someone who was leaving for a new job in Rome in four weeks. I was heady enough, romantic enough, Club 27 enough to not let that faze me: let me destroy my life, my heart. Let me suffer. And still' I was old enough to admire the part of him that was sure-headed'that cooked me dinners and frozen pizzas, that talked of jobs and condos, dogs and kids. When he asked if I could stevedore myself to Rome, we both knew I wouldn't.

Right now I'm Ingrid Bergman's Casablanca age'old enough not to give up everything, young enough to want to.

Previously in series: What Did You Want To Accomplish When You Grew Up?

Adriane Quinlan is a writer who lives in Minneapolis, where everything is cheaper, prettier, and friendlier than wherever you live.

Would You Like 'New York Times' Platinum Executive Status? (Yearly Joe Nocera Lapdance)

This "brainstorming about what the Times should do" is largely accurate. People love membership, when it doesn't suck. The idea is to go more MoMA or BAM and less NPR. Look at the BAM Cinema Club membership levels, which are (sorry!) better executed than MoMA's. But also, then look at airline frequent flyer programs. People love belonging. But more than they love belonging, they love having status. Scratch even the most socially liberal person and you'll still find a person that loves convenience, if not outright status snobbery. (Just speaking from personal experience!) (Photo credit.)

What Did You Want To Accomplish When You Grew Up?

The first in a series about youth.

When you're a kid, there are no limits on the world'everything seems possible. When he was seven, my brother truly believed that one day he'd wake up to see a T-Rex peering at him through his bedroom. (Yes, he had just watched Jurassic Park.) He also talked about inventing a plane that could withstand the strength of a tornado enough to fly within its wind currents, for a real bird's-eye view of the storm. To find out other would-be inventions and asked an assorted group of tech- and science-minded folks, "When you were young, what did you want to invent, discover or accomplish in the future?" Here's what they said.

Sam Biddle, senior staff writer at Gizmodo

I never wanted to invent anything when I was little. Probably because my parents were writers, and that's a silly and impossible thing to try to comprehend when you're tiny. Like most little boys in a vaguely militarized society, I wanted to be an astronaut and be in rockets and discover planets, until my parents told me you had to be in the Air Force before you could be an astronaut. Is that even true? I never really followed up, since I was, like, five. My parents didn't push me in any direction as I grew up, but didn't want their tiny little guy having missiles fired at him, so it was vaguely discouraged. That was the end of the astronaut phase. Then I dreamt of being an undersea explorer, idolizing Robert Ballard and Jacques Cousteau, only to gather from my parents that pretty much everything underwater had been discovered already, especially the Titanic, which had the fuck discovered out of it already. After going to the British Museum when I was eight years old, being an Egyptologist seemed pretty neat, and it impressed dinner party guests when I said "Egyptologist," but then my parents told me that all the stuff had been found in all the Pyramids and tombs, and that it probably wouldn't be something anyone could do by the time I grew up. I think this is probably true, so thanks, Mom and Dad. By then I was starting to get really excited by books and reading, so I just figured I could somehow make money doing what my parents did, and gave up studying math and science and diverted all of my mental energy into Star Wars novels and writing dumb short stories about robots and museum heists and robot museums. But my parents are proud of me now as a non-child, so I'm mostly pleased too.

Rebecca Boyle, Popular Science contributor

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut'Sally Ride, who passed away recently, was my personal heroine. In 1986, my haircut was pretty much exactly like hers. Thanks to her, it never occurred to me that it would be groundbreaking or uncommon for a woman to fly a space shuttle or study physics'it seemed eminently reasonable. I had an inflatable shuttle in my bedroom and I covered the walls with glow-in-the-dark stars arranged like constellations. I dreamed of going into space and discovering a comet, just like Halley's Comet. I even tried to read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and kept a dictionary next to me so I could look up the biggest words.

When I was in sixth grade, my parents indulged this ambition by sending me to Space Camp, which was awesome despite the fact that I was mercilessly teased for my astronaut flight suit. Then I grew up to be a writer instead. Two weeks ago, I was at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Curiosity landing, and it felt like coming full circle'I might not fly into space, but I can do it virtually. Although, you never know. If there's ever a volunteer mission for humans to Mars, maybe I'll sign up and blog about it.

Matt Buchanan, editor of Buzzfeed's FWD blog

I like sleeping. I hate missing things. What that's meant, forever, is that I often stay up until 4am or until dawn, and then I wind up sleeping to four in the afternoon. Less than ideal. I've gotten better about this since I've gotten older'''cause like, work'but it's still one of the core dynamics in my life. So when I was younger I wanted to invent a method or device or like discover alien technology so that whenever I went to sleep, the whole world stopped cold. Paused. I even imagined a cool special effects sequence that would show what it was like'because I figure in those moments between being fully awake and fully asleep, or have a waking dream, that whole world would be tripping balls. Things would be slowing down and speeding up. No one would know but me, of course. But it'd mean I could sleep as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I'd never miss a thing. What a luxury.

Clay Dillow, contributing writer at Popular Science

When I was a kid, my dad picked up this two-seater go-cart at a second-hand sale. My brother, sister, and I loved that thing, and we spent innumerable hours tearing around the place, as well as fixing flat tires and learning how to replace the perennially blown clutch. It was at some point during these years that I became fascinated with the idea of powered parachutes, or PPCs'those three-wheeled, dune-buggy-looking vehicles that fly suspended beneath a huge parachute. I remember desperately wanting to figure a way to hack that go-cart'with all five of its horsepower at my command'into a powered parachute of some kind. In essence, I wanted to invent my own personal flying machine. So in some respects, maybe I wanted to invent the flying car. But really I just wanted to shake myself loose from a two-axis, terrestrial existence and go skyward'an impulse that I feel is perfectly natural.

I also wanted to invent teleportation. Still do.

Cory Doctorow, writer and BoingBoing editor

Total, multilateral, global nuclear disarmament.

Kelly Faircloth, tech writer at Betabeat and The Observer

Ever since an all-too-early exposure to "Star Trek: The Next Generation," I've been obsessed with faster-than-light travel. But it turns out I'm completely, utterly horrible at math, and therefore I realized pretty early on I would not be inventing FTL technology. So my abiding secret desire as a child was to discover some Stargate-style ancient alien relic with spacefaring technology that humanity could just rip off. Voilà! A shortcut to the stars.

Sadly, there were no extraterrestrial wrecks to be stumbled upon in Middle Georgia. (I checked.)

Ann Finkbeiner, writer and The Last Word on Nothing proprietor

If "young" is between 10 and 15: I lived on a small farm that didn't distinguish between men's work and women's work, you just did what needed to be done. So though I was obsessed with books, feeding chickens or cleaning bathrooms or hoeing beans usually needed to be done'the upshot being that I read those books behind chairs where I wouldn't be noticed. All this created in me a powerful laser-like yearning to get the hell out of Dodge and write books myself, books that would take the reader into rich and meaningful worlds that would make beautiful and orderly sense. I didn't do that though.

John Green, writer

I wanted to be an earthworm scientist. I basically wanted to be this guy. That guy has my dream job. Later, by high school, I wanted to be a novelist, but I think I mostly just wanted to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember when Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that seemed really fun and exciting.

Rebecca Greenfield, staff writer at The Atlantic Wire

As a child, I was concerned with the mundane: traffic and weather. Being late made me anxious, so when stuck in traffic jams, I dreamt up a genius invention called the flying car that, when stopped behind a long line of motionless cars, could fly above and beyond the traffic. (Different than an airplane! Because it could also drive on the road. And, was in the shape of my family's minivan.) I understood that there were inherent complications with my invention. If everyone had flying cars, then there would be flying car traffic jams. (Point defeated.) And, in-flight accidents would probably be nastier than on the ground ones. But, I was more concerned with the end goal: A world without traffic, something that would make a lot of people'but especially me'happier and more on-time.

I also loved arguing about the weather, a skill that would lead to my eventual election as the first female president of the United States of America. Weather-related arguments involved convincing someone they were either wrong about the forecast or about the current ambient conditions. These arguments were easy to win because nobody wants to get into a deep conversation about what it's like outside, unless they are a grandparent and grandparents always let their grandchildren win. These sparring talents meant I was destined to be a great lawyer, and, as we know, great lawyers get elected presidents of countries. I am not sure younger me knew what future me's presidential platform would involve, but it probably had something to do with global warming'rising gas prices were another worry of mine. And, waste'I hated waste. Perhaps I should have gone the law school route because the climate is scarier than it was back then and the planet could probably use some of President Greenfield's green policy proposals. (E.g. "Mom, why didn't you take the reusable bags to Wegmans!")

Fred Guterl, Scientific American executive editor

In nursery school I remember this one kid whom the "big kindergarten kids" made fun of. I recall they objected to his shoes for some reason. He and I started hanging out on the swings and the jungle gym together. I don't remember when we started to get interested in space, but when we were a little older we became obsessed. It was the early 1960s, during the moon race, and NASA was launching Mercury and Gemini capsules, in the long slow crescendo to Apollos, which seemed hopelessly distant and futuristic. All my friend and I wanted to do and think about was try and get into orbit somehow. We would spend hours in the garage, building spaceships out of anything we could find lying around. We built one out of plywood and two-by-fours that was triangular, with a "control panel" of old screws and knobs, and we'd spend hours fiddling with them and practicing for the day we just knew would arrive when the ship would carry us aloft. A while later we use pointy wood screws to attach the two garbage to one another, and attached them in turn to the top of an old discarded boiler casing we had found in the woods. I climbed a ladder and crawled into the "capsule" on top. My friend lit the boiler. It didn't take off. I remember yelling, "It's getting hot!" Mission aborted. My friend kicked the whole apparatus over. I still have a scar from the landing'one of those sharp screws was sticking out. Eventually, my friend and I drifted apart, the space program went into remission, we got interested in adolescent things. It took many years for me to return to that early inspiration. Now I'm a science writer.

Eric Hand, reporter for Nature

I wanted to build a massive, livable, year-round treehouse.

Reyhan Harmanci, West Coast editor of Buzzfeed's FWD blog

My mother quit her job when she had kids, and she was always very ambivalent about that choice. It made a big impression on me: When I was little, I didn't have any particular calling but really craved some kind of professional success. I can remember learning about obituaries and my parents telling me that the highest honor was to have an obituary in The New York Times and then plowing through old Times newspapers, trying to figure out what kind of person was most likely to get this award. I came up with "businessman" which was handy, because at the time, my fourth-grade side hustle involved making and selling (non-ironically) friendship bracelets for $.50 each. But even as I cycled through numerous career paths (in my head)'artist, lawyer, fashion designer, novelist, horseback rider, potter, hair stylist, Supreme Court judge, presidential speech writer'that dream of being featured in a New York Times obituary persisted. It only occurred to me later that even if I did get that highest of honors, how would I know?

Thomas Hayden, reporter

When I was a preschooler, I just wanted to be a cowboy or a firefighter. I managed to do a little bit of both of those along the way, but by the time I was about 14, what I wanted to invent more than anything were machines powered by the heat of a well-turned compost heap. I experimented for years, trying to maximize heat production and energy capture, and eventually managed to power a small steam engine with compost heat, using petroleum ether rather than water. I subsequently studied microbial ecology in university to push my efforts further but then, tragically, became distracted by writing and threw my life away on science journalism. Imagine if Tesla had been similarly seduced by the high glamor of the written word? Devastating!

John Herrman, deputy tech editor at Buzzfeed

I had a pretty short dream-span as a kid. I also had the unfortunate, but I think common habit of interpreting small approvals as, like, cosmic endorsements'a good grade or a nice comment or just any little success was a sign that I could eventually master some new thing, no problem. (Q: What makes a millennial a Millennial? A: A conflation of ability and actual accomplishment combined with a gross overestimation of ability.) There was an author phase (I was going to write the next Hardy Boys), a scientist (paleontologist) phase, a doctor phase. Lots of short phases, followed by a healthy and complete teenage collapse of confidence.

Last time I was asked this question was when my middle-school class was assembling a 20-year time capsule. My note to myself had a dollar attached, to go toward a beer with my two best friends at the time, and a pencil-scrawled insult: "Are you seriously not married yet?"

Sarah Kessler, associate editor at Fast Company

When I was seven, my parents told me that I could have a pony' if I bought it myself.

At the time, I didn't realize this actually meant no, so I enlisted my neighborhood accomplice, and we set to work dividing our allowance into mason jars labeled "horse," "horse food" and "barn."

It turned out that financing a horse cost more than our combined $15 of life savings. And as a pair of seven-year-olds, our employment opportunities were limited. Thus we were forced into entrepreneurship. We made friendship bracelets to hawk at the local beach, set up a lemonade stand on our rarely trafficked rural road and attempted to sell our younger brothers into manual labor.

I'd like to say this scheme was the first sign of budding business prowess. After all, we did make, like, 20 bucks. But I think it was much more indicative of how much I wanted a freaking pony.

Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor of BoingBoing

I was about 5 or 6 when I first came up with an answer for the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" My early career goal: Become a ballet-dancing archaeologist who was also President of the United States. Apparently, I expected to be much better at time management than I actually am.

Matt Langer, Awl contributor and New York Times developer

I always wanted the future to look the way it did in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling novels. Like it did in Blade Runner, more or less: dystopic but strangely enough still kind of alluring, this hypertechnologized world where it just rains all the time and the sun never comes out because the atmosphere's been pumped so full of gases (ha, which shows how neurotic we are, really, considering that back in the '80s our collective awareness of these things was pretty much limited to a fuzzy understanding of the term "chlorofluorocarbons" and a gnawing worry about using too much hair spray). But the (ugh, for lack of a better word obviously) cyberpunk world those guys portrayed not only seemed totally plausible (if not even a little bit inevitable) but it also gave something of a silver lining to the notion of a dystopia, at least inasmuch as sure, yes, we couldn't see the sun, but look at us we were still conquering this miserable world with our TECHNOLOGY! And so in any event this was all very appealing to young nerdy me, the thought that I could grow up to live in a city illuminated only by neon lighting and blinkering LEDs, where people ducked into noodle bars to get out of the rain and ate alone while chefs bantered away behind the counter in foreign languages. There was even an old video game that did this world very well, a game called Privateer (part of the Wing Commander franchise for those who remember the days when video games used to come on forty-odd 3.5" floppies), and one of the missions in that game took you to a city that perfectly captured this future: lots of rain and dark alleyways, severe concrete architecture, light sources that always flickered, etc. Looking back I realize the aesthetic was probably just "Tokyo in shitty weather," but whatever, it felt exotic. Anyway, turns out all these sci-fi writers were only right about the greenhouse gas half of their dystopian futures because we'll all actually just be dying in fires and floods pretty soon here'but it was fun to pretend while we could!

Tom McGeveran, co-editor of Capital New York

I figured out pretty early on that I wanted to be a philosophy professor'somewhere around sophomore year of high school. This seemed both a safe (ha!) and fulfilling (perhaps ha?) idea at the time, and it stayed with me for about seven or eight years.

I was going to go get a PhD in philosophy, and figure out some way of turning all of the stuff in common among followers of Derrida and his ilk, and Catholic theologians, and Talmudic scholars, into some kind of not-crazy, distinctly American moral philosophy that would matter, on the scale of John Rawls, but across metaphysics and epistemology and not just politics or ethics or law. I felt, in a way that seems adolescent in retrospect, probably because it was, like I alone realized they were speaking the same language and that our cause was against analytic and Anglo-American philosophy, which was doing lots of great stuff on its own but was much in danger of removing the most important questions of philosophy from the agenda.

I hadn't quite figured it out yet'I thought the answers lay somewhere in the nexus you could find Thomas Merton, Gershom Scholem, and Derrida all crossing, and I was starting to think of Emmanuel Levinas as a weird lodestone.

I wasn't serious enough not to want to fuck around after college a bit (where I took really only philosophy, language and history classes, and as few required courses as possible), as everyone did in the mid-90s, but I was pretty sure my fate was there waiting for me, as an inevitability.

But I had a rude awakening when I was accepted to zero philosophy PhD programs (apparently 23 year old white men who would like to simply try, again, to explain how absolutely everything works with a simple theory were not yet in vogue), and when I started hearing the stories of academics a few years older than me who were trying to get on. They all kind of high-fived each other when one of them got an appointment to a rural community college post in Alberta.

After my post-college rumspringa from academics, in which I switched low-paying temp and administrative jobs every couple months to keep being able to go out to gay bars, downtown performance art events and poetry readings, I realized I would never unlock that philosophical-diplomatic secret, never really figure any of that out, and that I would never be a world-changing poet or philosopher or priest. It was weirdly comforting: I was finally able to get down to work. And, I loved New York too much to ever consider leaving it.

Michelle Nijhuis, Smithsonian contributing writer

A few years ago, my alma mater sent me a copy of the application essay I wrote in 1990. (It was typed. With a typewriter, kids.) I cringed and put the envelope in a file. Now that The Awl has given me a reason to finally read it, I'll risk humiliating my 17-year-old self'I can just hear the poor girl rolling her eyes'with an excerpt.

Once I thought that I wanted to be Something. I saw Something as a mystical title, indefinite but recognized by all: she is Something, isn't he Something, wow aren't they Something.

I did not know that in order to be Something, one must "exhibit leadership potential" but never realize that potential until the proper time. One must belong to many organizations and stand for many causes, but never weep or scream or take a radical stance on behalf of anyone in particular. One must always use a soft lead pencil, fill in the circle completely, and make the mark dark.

I didn't realize that if you're going to be Something, you certainly can't walk up any waterfalls or sound any barbaric yawps (although you may read selected works of Walt Whitman. Selected mind you) or haunt any dusty bookshops or travel to any exotic foreign countries except for business purposes. You can't drink fewer than eight glasses of water each day, and you can't let someone lean on your shoulder without expecting something back. You can't laugh at the world as you try to save it, and you can't sing in the shower. And I keep telling you that there will be none of that kite flying while you're on the way to being Something.

When I discovered all of this, I thought, well, isn't that something. And being Something wasn't very attractive any more, for suddenly I could be anything.

David Quammen, writer

When I was a boy I thought I wanted to be 1) a herpetologist, or 2) an entomologist, or 3) a writer. Slightly later, I focused on writing, and thought for a while the ideal career path would be writing satiric songs or else novels. Then I rediscovered the natural world, discovered science, discovered nonfiction.

Jessica Roy, tech reporter for the Observer and Betabeat

My favorite book as a kid was Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards, a novel about an orphaned girl who climbs over the wall behind her orphanage and discovers this little cottage that she fixes up and turns into her own hideaway. I dreamed constantly of growing up and finding my own abandoned place like that where I could sit and read and be alone. I once found a pile of boards stacked against a tree in a wooded area near my house, but it turned out to be a homeless man's squatting zone, so that didn't turn out so well. I also used to scale this weeping willow tree by my elementary school and settle into the branches to read and pretend it was a secret place, but one day the school district decided to cut it down. A group of men arrived wielding tree cutting equipment and my fourth-grade teacher let me and a friend leave class so that we could go over and try to stop them from chopping down our favorite tree. The men just laughed at us. I stole a piece of bark from the doomed tree, which is probably still buried among love notes and paper fortune tellers in a box in my dad's garage. I settled for building blanket forts and dreaming about publishing a novel "by age 25" in my bedroom after that.

Matt Soniak, Mental Floss blogger

1. I wanted to invent a machine that would efficiently squeeze toothpaste out of the tube for me, and not leave any little bits behind.

2. I was obsessed, around the age of eight or nine, with the idea of discovering a stable, hidden population of animals outside their native range. For a little while I was sure I had evidence of a group of marmosets living on the streets of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

3. I wanted to touch a boob.

I was an ambitious kid, I guess. I have since accomplished at least one of these things.

Clive Thompson, Wired columnist

I'm 43, so I started playing video games with Pong and Space Invaders. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in the arcades of Toronto, and I desperately wanted to make my own video games.

I figured if I had my own computer, I could have taught myself. But my parents, while totally middle class and able to buy one, wouldn't. My mother argued I'd just use it to "waste time playing games." She didn't realize that playing games is a conduit to thinking about games and, for me anyway, learning how to program well enough that I could make my own. (Though she wasn't entirely wrong either; I'd probably have blown a lot of schoolwork playing games.) I knew a bit of programming back then but not enough to make good games.

So I put my game-designing desires on the backburner and worked instead on my other big desire, which was to be a journalist. Luckily, that one worked out!

The great thing is that in the intervening years, learning programming has become easier and easier. I've always done bits of programming here and there, mostly so that I know, intellectually, what a language is capable of. But I never bothered to learn so much that I could make games. Now, however, there are a bunch of languages that are amazingly well suited to making interactive games, like Processing, or pieces of hardware for making interactive physical games, like the Arduino.

My six-year-old son recently asked me, in a hilarious generational echo, 'Hey, how could we make our own video game?' So I downloaded MIT's free Scratch programming language, which is custom-designed for letting kids design games, and together we've designed a couple of games in the last few months. It is, as I'd suspected, a blast playing a game that you yourself have created.

In a way, I'm glad I never became a game designer, because'having met game designers, and gotten a glimpse beneath the hood'I doubt I'd be very good at it. It requires a type of devotion, creativity, and attention to detail that I do not really possess. But I'm glad that programming language for DIY game-making has become simple enough that one can now dabble in it. It's a great hobby!

Nitasha Tiku, staff writer for the Observer and Betabeat

I was never one of those kids who took things apart just to put them back together, which is probably a leading indicator for becoming an inventor or builder (of physical things, code, etc.). Much like hurting animals '> serial killing. A friend once showed me the wire-y insides of a radio he'd pried open in his basement and I was like, Oh, so that's how you figure out how things work. And not, as I did, by reading the book The Way Things Work, then promptly forgetting where lightning came from.

I wanted to discover excuses to stay indoors and read. Like rain or minor apocalypses. After my brother and I watched Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, set in limbo) I worried there might be cameras secretly taping you everywhere, so I'd check around for them, especially in other peoples' bathrooms. Does that count as a "discovery"? Pretty sure I wanted to be good at everything and very special, eventually.

I tend to remember things very precisely or not at all, so I asked my parents.

He's talking about my My Little Pony, which reminds me'I wanted someone to invent something that tasted as good as that plastic smelled.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, writer
Phillip Larkin invented sex in 1963. Masturbation was created twenty-five years later when I discovered it's basic formula. During that period of time, I wanted nothing more than to invent a cure for masturbation, a painless antidote. My mission was partly successful by 1989 when I (finally) threw away my mother's tattered and sodden copy of The Joy of Sex book I kept under my bed.

David Wagner, writer for The Atlantic Wire

It probably isn't hip to admit that you were ever devoutly religious, but when my kindergarten teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I confidently answered, "a pope." That's right. Not the pope. A pope. I thought they were as common as firefighters and astronauts. Imagine my surprise when I found out that only one dude at a time got to ride around in the Popemobile.

I come from the kind of Catholic family that goes above and beyond attending mass every Sunday (people who don't observe holy days of obligation aren't real Catholics, after all). First holy communion, confession, confirmation'I went through the whole sacramental suite. I even did time as an altar boy and played in the church praise band (I know bragging is a sin, but man could I lift the Lord's name on high). Other families teach kids to revere the President, or brain surgeons, or maybe engineers. But where I come from, no earthly mortal is more important than the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

I wasn't all that disappointed to learn that my papal aspirations were highly unrealistic, just surprised. I guess it was the first time I realized that "you can accomplish anything you set your mind to" is more of a pat on the head than a true statement. I began cycling through other career choices. Those guys who flip signs at intersections, pointing drivers toward the furniture outlet, seemed pretty cool for a while. After seeing Jurassic Park, I pictured myself as an intrepid paleontologist. Later, I thought seriously about becoming that jazzy dude in Nordstrom who tinkles away at the piano. If someone would've told me that I'd grow up to write for the Internet, I would've said, "How can somebody write for Yahooligans?"

Now that I'm what you might call a lapsed Catholic, I look back on my younger self and chuckle. But after I get through chuckling, some wistfulness sets in. I no longer have any desire to be a pope, but I do sometimes wish my head were still filled with such innocent, naive dreams.

John Wenz, writer

I became an iffy believer in the concept of God sometime around when I was 13. And I was in Catholic school at the same time, which put me in a weird, weird place. After being told the concept of God and Heaven for so long, suddenly the most terrifying thought to me was the concept that of consciousness ending and that being it when I die. So of course my iffy understanding of science led me to the ultimate idea for an invention I couldn't possibly implement: I wanted either a robotic body I could put my brain into and live forever, or I wanted to entirely digitize my brain and be able to live as a sentient computer program, like a really boring version of The Matrix entirely design to allay my fear of death. Some of the details of the robotic body have changed'I no longer need it to withstand the vacuum of space'I'm not entirely sure I've given up on this dream.

Related: What Books Make You Cringe To Remember?

Nadia Chaudhury wanted to somehow create the ability to stop time like the girl from Out of This World. She still wants it. Top photo and Gemini capsule illustration courtesy of NASA; photo of powered parachute by Derek Jensen; pony photo by Steve Lodefink; Popemobile photo by Broc.

IDF Bulldozer Officially Accidentally Runs Over Person Twice

The death of Rachel Corrie'who was bulldozed while trying to prevent a house demolition in Palestine, atop a pile of dirt and wearing an fluorescent orange vest'has been ruled an accident in court in Israel.

Life: How Much Longer Do You Have To Keep Doing It?

How many years might be added to a life? A few longevity enthusiasts suggest a possible increase of decades. Most others believe in more modest gains. And when will they come? Are we a decade away? Twenty years? Fifty years? Even without a new high-tech 'fix' for aging, the United Nations estimates that life expectancy over the next century will approach 100 years for women in the developed world and over 90 years for women in the developing world. (Men lag behind by three or four years.) Whatever actually happens, this seems like a good time to ask a very basic question: How long do you want to live?

I've been thinking about this very basic question for a while now, and weighing all the pros and cons'the fact that life is essentially a series of disappointments, underwhelming events, long waits in lines behind people who could care less about whether or not they are inconveniencing you through their own idiocy, the chance to experience the inevitable decline in your mental and physical abilities, and the opportunity to watch your loved ones die vs. the occasional enjoyable meal or movie that actually isn't too bad'I'm going to say "28 years." Which I guess puts me into suffering's golden time right now. How 'bout you? Tell us in the comments. Or whatever. It doesn't matter either way. Nothing does.