"The payoff of surviving your 20’s has to be that when you make mistakes or fall down the stairs, literally or figuratively, you don’t think of yourself as a person who makes mistakes or falls down the stairs. There’s too much historical evidence that you are not always the one: sometimes I am the one, sometimes he’s the one. Your hyperhidrosis ain’t shit, girl, compared to the cystic acne over there and the IBS way over there and the narcolepsy in the back. But of course it’s all there is, until you become Larry David (the metamorphosis starts early, but the progression is slow and almost imperceptible (only remarked upon at random intervals); you won’t die of it, you’ll die with it). READ MORE

One thing I very much enjoyed over my Christmas vacation was the New Yorker profile of Vampire Weekend. It was pretty great! It is not online, because why would you put a piece on a band that is wildly popular amongst the youngs up on the Internet? (I KNOW, you have your reasons, New Yorker, I'm sorry, I will shut up.) But here is a "fair use" (??) excerpt of one of the best parts of the piece. In it, the members of Vampire Weekend-who are being followed by, in addition to the New Yorker reporter, a documentary camera crew-go to visit and interview Tom DeLonge from Blink 182, who greets them with his own documentary camera crew. Amazing! This piece is so highly enjoyable, from beginning to end. And yet I will complain that it suffers a bit from between .75 to 1.25 of the two big afflictions of magazine essaying. READ MORE

We are both in awe of and profound debt to everyone who contributed to our End of the 00s series. I know how much you love it when I get earnest, so I'll just keep it brief and say that we were overwhelmed by both the willingness of so many people to provide these pieces and the quality of the material they gave to us. Anyway, because of the vagaries of the holiday weekends and our brilliant idea to switch servers in the middle of a gigantic, ongoing project, it's a pretty fair bet that you missed at least one of the 49 essays in the series. Here's a list of every single one of them, which we encourage you to dip into at your leisure; there is almost certainly something here for everyone. Enjoy. READ MORE