Posts from Popula

It was the most prominent of a series of cases that came to characterize a phenomenon its proponents called “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA). It was widespread enough that it feels disorienting to see a pop culture homage to the period, like The Devil Made Me Do It, that doesn’t even mention it.

To the email from my employer telling me I’d lost my job, Google offered three suggested replies:

The following is an excerpt of a recent conversation on a longstanding listserv devoted to the work of David Foster Wallace, lightly edited and presented here with the authors’ permission.

We found these bees in the attic and called a bee guy to rescue and “rehome” them. Fear converted into multilayered relief.

In the current moment of political unrest, Nigerians worry that the ban on Twitter is meant as a distraction from the colossal economic and social fallout of a disastrous year, as the global economy continues to reel from the pandemic.

Where did he get infected? Was hospitalization necessary? Why didn’t they intubate earlier? Was he receiving the right treatment? The questions flooded my cell phone, but I decided to relinquish control and trust the doctors to take care of my dad.

We’ll figure out how much JB spends on himself and his own needs—his personal expenses to do his life, each year—and calculate income taxes for that sum as if it were what working people call “income.” Because that would be fair.

A boy watching this scene might one day have much better things to write in his diary: smooth roads stretching through beautiful towns and countryside, bushes, hills, and everything else along the way; people who are happy and well cared for; police, if there are any to be seen, who neither scowl nor brandish their firearms, nor beg as if for alms.

The outbreak started just across the street from me. The explosion of cases, which began on May 15th, has mostly been traced back to “tea parlors” in Bangka, the district of Taipei where I live.

Like lots of other things in Central New York, and like a lot of “nature” itself, the trail is something repurposed, turned beautiful long after it stopped being useful to humans. Back in the day, people walked their mules parallel to the water here, and the mules pulled floating goods along that needed transporting.

Ten years after one of the deadliest tornadoes in history ripped through his town, an ex-newspaper reporter remembers all that was lost and all that was left.

I am firmly on Team Pupfish. But the sense of looming trade-offs is inescapable. The losses are already vast, and they have begun to trigger yet more losses. We can’t save it all. So how do we decide what to save?

"I for lef Ghana," a pidgin phrase meaning “I need to leave Ghana,” has grown increasingly popular on Twitter in Ghana recently.