Sublime

himself into a rage. “These guys are focusing on the worst tendencies of some of the worst women out there and spreading it like a cloud of fertilizer on all women.” Ross reminded me of an old rhythm-and-blues artist who has been ripped off so much that he trusts no one. But at least there are publishing companies and copyrights in place to protect

A few years ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had produced the world’s first CRISPR-edited humans—twin baby girls. According to He, the girls’ genes had been tweaked to confer resistance to HIV, though whether this is actually the case remains unclear. Shortly after he made the announcement, He was placed under house arrest in

of type you’d see in magazines, anything that might look familiar to people. The goal, always, was real-world references. I was from suburban Philadelphia, so I named the fonts after stops on the Paoli Local—so Rosemont, Paoli, Ardmore, Overbrook. Steve thought city names were fine, but he asked why would we pick these little cities that nobody had

Mystery, he also had a reputation for befriending younger students just so they’d take him to parties. I invited Ross to his first event the following week. Monica, a struggling but well-connected actress I’d sarged, had invited me to her birthday party at Belly, a tapas bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I thought it would be a good scene full of beau

We found we had to add a complete collection of hate speech to the dictionary and explicitly mark those words to prevent the software from ever offering them as autocorrections—imagine trying to type “nugget” but narrowly mistyping the first vowel or the last consonant. We didn’t want to offer racial epithets as a “helpful” aid, and we resolved tha

Pocho is ordinarily a derogatory term in Mexico (to define it succinctly, a pocho is a Mexican slob who has pretensions of being a gringo sonofabitch), but I use it in a very special sense. To me that word has come to mean “uprooted Mexican,” and that’s what I have been all my life.

Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William

He was supposed to be the best, a master PUA who specialized in bisexual women. His garish style of dress, like that of a Vegas lounge lizard, was one of the inspirations for Mystery’s peacock theory. Rick H. was short, slightly stocky, and dressed in a large-collared shirt and a red blazer. Trailing behind him were six attraction adepts eager to s