or nearly a decade, Bell had beamed Coast into the dead of night, five nights a week, from 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. PST. Boasting 15 million nightly listeners across the United States at the height of his popularity, he famously dealt in paranormal, conspiratorial, and supernatural themes. “From the high desert and the great American Southwest,” Bell intoned over the pulse of Giorgio Moroder’s paranoid Midnight Express instrumental, “I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be.”
The mythologies of both night and desert lent Coast the allure of the unknown, locating it on the fringes of experience. One could equally expect to tune in to discussions of life on Mars, Bigfoot sightings, vaccine-administered microchips, government-sanctioned alien-hybrid breeding programs, doomsday predictions, or cataclysmic climate change.
Mr. Knight, 75, is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, which is less a movement than a loose consortium of people who believe that the best thing humans can do to help the Earth is to stop having children.
Mr. Knight added the word “voluntary” decades ago to make it clear that adherents do not support mass murder or forced birth control, nor do they encourage suicide. Their ethos is echoed in their motto, “May we live long and die out,” and in another one of their slogans, which Mr. Knight hangs at various conventions and street fairs: “Thank you for not breeding.”
On 25 February 1988, at a performance in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bruce Springsteen forgot the opening lines to his all-time greatest hit, Born to Run.
According to the conventional wisdom about the nature of forgetting, set down in the decades straddling the turn of 20th Century, this simply should not have happened. Forgetting seems like the inevitable consequence of entropy: where memory formation represents a sort of order in our brains that inevitably turns to disorder. Given enough time, cliffs crumble into the sea, new cars fall to pieces, blue jeans fade. As Springsteen put it in his song Atlantic City: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." Why should the information in our minds be any different?
The life and death of a female monkey sacrificed some 1,700 years ago may provide important clues to the rise of one of the world’s most powerful ancient cities: Teotihuacan. Located in what is now Mexico, this power center influenced much of Mesoamerica in the first half of the first millennium A.D.
There are sad foods from personal memories: the frozen dinner my newly divorced dad heated up in the dirty microwave in the sloppy transitional apartment that he shared with a roommate. The chocolate my mom bought me as a treat to comfort myself when she was away on business. When a date got up and left in the middle of our dinner, throwing down insufficient cash with an insufficient “I’m not feeling this—take care,” my plate of pasta was extremely sad; it became only sadder when the waitress asked me if I wanted it packaged up to go. I did.
You see, Sad Food is not the same as Solitude Food. Solitude Food celebrates the luxury of being intentionally alone. It’s often found on room-service menus when you’re spread out on the oversize bed of a chain hotel and contemplating whether to send for the burger or the salmon on your company’s credit card as you flip through cable channels and settle on an ’80s movie. A coffee shop offers a wealth of Solitude Food: a croissant balancing at the edge of a table, making room for a book and a large coffee saucer, especially if that pastry has been ordered as “the usual.” And few Solitude Foods are better than a bucket of popcorn to oneself in the back of a movie theater on a rainy weekday afternoon of playing hooky.
What made the grammar of our early years,
moving from place to place, house to flimsy