The Way We Expose The Innocence Of Leaving Home In Order To Explore Life On Our Own In The Big Apple Now

“The 19-year-old daughter of ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ star Yolanda Foster exposes the innocence of leaving home to explore life on her own in the Big Apple by posing completely nude in the April issue of VMan magazine.”

If you are of the opinion that “airbnb” is actually the best way to figure out the minimum amount of money you would accept to let two strangers fuck in your bed, you should probably consider the possibility that it might be more than two strangers, and it might be in more than just your bed. “The worst part of the Internet right there was in my apartment,” says the unlucky amateur hotelier in question.

INTERNETS “FEELS” HAS BEEN A LEGIT TERM SINCE AT LEAST 1782. pic.twitter.com/iaC1UJr2Yw

— Karen Healey (@kehealey) March 17, 2014

Important historical research has been performed by author Karen Healey. Her research has led her to this letter from Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, from 1782, noted in Amanda Foreman’s The Duchess. Today is a day to celebrate.

“When Kurt Cobain killed himself, 20 years ago this April 5, he became the sole top-level rock star ever to take his own life at the crest of his fame. The long list of other megawatt stars gone by his age — Jimi, Janis, Jim Morrison — fell by drug-related accidents. Or they were murdered, like Biggie and Tupac. But Cobain’s violent act put him into a sad club of one, a decision that adds a special chill and mystery to an already rare mythology.”
 — Where were you when you heard that Kurt Cobain killed himself? If your answer involves some variation of “recess” or “playdate” I’m just gonna cry. Anyway, guess what you’re gonna see a lot of over the next few weeks?

In our city’s nonstop cavalcade of hurt feelings and grievances and “what about me”s, it is sometimes hard to keep track of which constituency feels slighted by the mayor now. Today’s victim class: The Irish!

Later today, science-type people are going to make an announcement that they promise is super-exciting and also possibly intelligible to the non-science community. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the rumors have it, will be talking about evidence for “primordial gravitational waves.” Now is the time to bone up on your weird science, so that you can have an opinion about it, or what else is the point of living?

Here’s an explanation from a few years back:

So-called gravitational waves are a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — moving objects perturb spacetime, generating waves like a boat moving across a lake….Such primordial waves might offer the best means for testing cosmological models such as inflation, which holds that the newborn universe ballooned from a tiny pocket to something roughly 1026 times larger in just a sliver of a second.

I THINK THAT MEANS WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE?????

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Pterygium

Hallmark meteorology: a little what-if weather
sworn over time to the ridgeline conditions
the basiners downvalley to the lucky look
of trouble. In an updraft apprehension
replenishes the cloud, a steady sort of borrowing

against promise. Welling at bottom, a slow spring fills
centrally where it plummets, a sump and font that fills

convexity out to its inky meniscus, whether
there the landmark melancholy were owing
to the mirror it lends the blotted sky or to the condition
of abysses. A cygnet is drawn anyway, milky, apprehensive,

to water’s edge, to study his launch, and fixes his look
across the curvature, a creature whose rarity may — look

again — enrapture each round-turning drake that fills
brown the pond beyond his brink.

One’s apprehensive
tryst can be determinative: not to ask outright whether,
of his irregularity, it were wound or condition,

as though on the surface sensitive material were issuing
from the trademark metonymy, a little wing

a pilot polishes on his boy’s lapel. His broken look,
portioned out, is symptomatic, a precondition
even, of the miscue an infatuated lover ever fills
his windy pennant with, predicative of what-if weather.

What if you could see from your signature? A preemptive
brokerage, like a birthright, but more comprehensive

since the undersigned self-attests, and winks the other, undergoing
the immediate future: I’m with damage, the weather — 
what of it? — a blown impunity. Who holds this look
holds a man. Did it hurt? Was he smitten? Did it fill

when he was in velvet with shorthorn, and condition
him to devilshine? Was it mothered? Is its nacre a condition

thereof? Or is the birthmark masonry? Or perhaps if
we “drag it clear from its glacial stagnation” it fulfills
what Baudelaire proposed was beauty. Misfortune
exteriorized, rescuing liquidity from the mint. Now look

through that. Now see through these. The weather,
refocusing this way, is a matter to do (the matter either

weeping over) less with conditions than with outlook,
in the pink or, near squint, in the given umbrage
one from another has taken to bed — 
where partiality refills.

Brian Blanchfield is the author, newly, of A Several World, from Nightboat Books, and

The History of Ideas, 1973–2012, a chapbook published by Spork Press.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

[No stars] A smack in the face, after a night of thumping and creaking wind. The children’s gloves and mittens had to be relocated, but at least the inventory of clean sweaters had built up again. Threads of white showed on the river. The preschooler, who’d shaken off his mittens for the sake of carrying a toy car in his bare hand, relented after half a block and allowed the mittens to be put back on. Then he wanted a shoulder ride. Walking the back side of Trumpville with him up there was like driving an empty rental truck over a bridge in a crosswind. The gusts pushed the feet a little off course. By the time he reached the school washroom, his cheeks were a vivid magenta. Outside again, dust and litter were aloft and dive-bombing. Little icicles hung down from a livery sedan and a van.

“He didn’t call them ‘idiots.’ He was respectful.”
 — The governor of New Jersey now passes the “respectful” test by not calling hecklers “idiots.” I can’t wait until we set the bar so low that even a couple of “motherfuckers” don’t knock it over.

by Awl Sponsors

Antarctica is the last unspoiled place on earth — extreme one day and beautiful the next. Last year, Air New Zealand searched the globe to send one passionate person to Antarctica to join National Geographic photographer, Jason Edwards, on an epic adventure to help show the importance of the impact that climate change has on our planet.

With almost 2,000 applicants, picking one was too difficult, so instead two talented young people, Marli and Michael, were given the opportunity of a lifetime. These two winners put their survival skills to the test and captured life on the ice. From collecting samples of microbes to spending the day hanging out with Adelie penguins, this experience helps draw worldwide attention to the environment in Antarctica.

Check out the journey and head to antarctica.airnewzealand.com for the testimonials and pictures from the adventure, as well as to learn more about Air New Zealand’s partnership with Antarctica New Zealand and the New Zealand Antarctic Research Institute (NZARI).