Thom Yorke is holding the microphone out to a crowd that is singing the chorus of “Creep” in blunt buffalo unison, never missing a word. He shrugs. The tilt of his wrist says, look at these idiots, and maybe, I am an idiot myself. Then he smiles, one cheek lifting into an apple in the gray fog, and it is a real smile trying to pretend it isn’t. He begins to sing the final flight of notes, at first almost parodically, but then halfway through his voice bursts some constraint of bitterness and flowers into the real song, as big and as terrible as a tiger lily, and he has made it new, and it is his again. It defeats even the men calling out his name, on the verge of heckling, trying to steal him from himself, Thom, Thom, Thom. His skin is gone, he is utterly protected, he is the size of the arena and as alone as he was when he first discovered he had that sound inside him. He stands, squeezing the microphone as if it were the throat of what had hurt him, the rigid systems inside him blown, nothing more than a boy, wearing the only kind of shirt available at that time.
“I’ve never ever felt like that,” he says later in an interview, his face washed back to its usual pink pain, about seeing that crowd of anonymous thousands on a hill with their lighters all flickering. “It wasn’t a human feeling.”
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The unabomber had been right about everything! Well . . . not everything. The unabomber stuff he had gotten wrong. But that stuff about the Industrial Revolution had been right on the money.
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A reporter had once asked the unabomber if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison. “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general.”
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Once she had gone walking through Washington Square Park with a woman she knew from the portal, with long crisp gingerish hair that fell backward from a Flemish forehead. The woman pointed out an old man playing chess; she said she always looked for him as she walked to work, but he had gone missing for a few weeks recently, and it was such a relief to see him again, sliding his sure white knights on the L, bringing a dry rustling autumn to the leaf of his daily newspaper. “Maybe there are people in this life that we’re assigned to watch over,” they mused, and were comforted, but months later, she heard that the woman from the portal had disappeared, and no one would tell her how, where, why—or which green real park she could have walked through, to watch over her day by day.
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CIA Confirms “Charlie Bit My Finger” Was on One of Osama bin Laden’s Computers
Also a file called assss.jpeg.
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There must have been something in the air, because for the last few years we had all been giving ourselves fascist haircuts, shaving the sides down to a clean honest stubble, combing back the top with a snap of the wrist, it was visually witty because we knew so much better now, after all ideas are not attached to haircuts, are they? But all at once, and lifting tiki torches, the ideas were back as well, and wearing the same haircut we had thought to rehabilitate.
We were not partly to blame, were we? Because those haircuts really had looked good.
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When the car plowed into a crowd of protesters at a Nazi rally, she was there. Well, no, she wasn’t there, but her heart beat as though she were, it beat among its pack, racing and red and low to the ground. When the car killed a woman with the period-specific name of Heather, she knew a minute before her own mother did, maybe. And by the time she had all the facts, had pieced together what happened, where had the whole blue day gone? It had sailed into a face that saw the car coming, into a face that would now always be familiar, like someone who had been in her class.
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A voice shouting from the back of the room, Does this administration believe that slavery was wrong?
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Each day to turn to a single eye that scanned a single piece of writing. The hot reading did not just pour from her but flowed all around her; her concreteness almost impeded it, as if she were a mote in the communal sight. Sometimes the pieces addressed the highest topics: war, poverty, epidemics. Other times they were about going to a deli with a poor friend who was intimidated by the fancy ham. And we always called it that: a piece, a piece, a piece.