Readings

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's new film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is getting heat for its depiction of torture and how instrumental it proved in bin Laden's eventual killing. But critics are missing the larger point—the best reason for the use of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is that it complicates our picture of the "good guys."

Some recent and much discussed articles on first-person journalism and memoir show their blind spots when it comes to the artistic potential of creative non-fiction. There is an art to losing your shit in public—just look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Wurtzel.

At the start of a new year, otherworldly guidance is always useful. Especially if a supernatural thriller has you obsessed with demons to the point of sleeping with the light on. How do you cleanse your spiritual palate?

A new essay collection on the consciousness expanding properties of drugs begs the question: can one simultaneously write about a drug while honestly making sense of it?

Michelle Houellebecq's Platform might just be the perfect Hobbesian novel—a book that plunges the reader into a moral universe where normal people feel sick, and sick people feel normal. The third in a series of essays on reading as personal experience.