Amanda Fortini

Two summers ago, my neighbor in Las Vegas — an eloquent and refined man with one of the sharpest minds (and tongues) of anyone I know, a Wildean wit — admitted to me that he was depressed, and that his doldrums took the form of playing video games. If Oscar Wilde himself had materialized and told … Continue Reading

“Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea,” Antoine Roquentin, the dyspeptic protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, writes in his diary. “And this time it is new: it caught me in a café,” he continues, “I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw … Continue Reading

There’s a chapter of my life during my late 20s and early 30s that I refer to as “the Hollywood years.” I was living with my ex, an exacting man who badgered me constantly, in an unfurnished bungalow tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, high above the teeming, seedy parts of the city. He’d written a … Continue Reading

I was in a Walgreens browsing the supplements aisle, as I am wont to do, loitering among the zinc lozenges and nasal sprays. It was a late fall night in 2017: The flu season that year was especially severe — a scarily virulent strain, the news kept warning — and would end up being one of the … Continue Reading

In February 1892, Mark Twain published a travelogue recounting his visit to Marienbad, the European spa town where everyone from Nietzsche to Freud had come to take the cure. The essay, titled “An Austrian Health Factory,” detailed his impressions of the “curative springs” where, among other … Continue Reading

In the bleak end-of-winter days of March 2013, I found myself reporting a story from a barge on the Mississippi River. The barge was parked near President’s Island, a forlorn peninsula in southwest Memphis blighted by chemical plants and agribusiness operations, where great drifts of garbage … Continue Reading

It’s 6pm on a Sunday. You have an imminent deadline and a flight that departs the next morning, and you have yet to pack. You sigh and check your phone, where you see that the culture wars are still ablaze, inflation continues to climb, and the financial system is careening toward imminent … Continue Reading