Discover more from Leaflet
“A thin, gray layer covers even her fingernails, smelling vaguely of Play-Doh and rosemary. Clay? She tries in vain to wipe it off. Just relax and enjoy the vision, she tells herself, going limp, letting go, as they used to say in yoga. It’s a bit cold. She wishes she had a sweater or blanket, even a T-shirt.” —Rachel B. Glaser, in a haunting short story about the afterlife in The Paris Review
“When [the Russian-to-English translator Constance Garnett] first met [the revolutionary and terrorist] Stepniak, she was aghast at one thing above all else. ‘To my horror,’ she wrote in an unpublished memoir, ‘I found that he habitually carried books out of the British Museum reading room at the lunch-hour, and I could not make him feel it was a crime, since, as he said, he always took them back.’ ” —Jennifer Wilson on Constance Garnett in the New York Times Book Review
“Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.” —Julian Lucas, in an utterly lovely profile of Samuel Delany in the New Yorker
“In most cases, the best way to know if a new drug works is to deny access to some people it might benefit. This is a wrenching but often necessary trade-off. To prioritize access over knowledge is to address the needs of current patients at the expense of future ones. Either way, it’s the lives of patients all the way down.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Relvyrio, a new drug for ALS that cost $158,000 a year and was approved despite ambiguous evidence of efficacy
“In 1944, after his success as the Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939) had yielded Dad only second banana roles, he sold his Coldwater Canyon house to Betty Grable and moved back East for good. On screen, with the camera’s naturalistic requirements, his gorgeous fuss came across as overwrought; his low comic energy could only be contained as an animal. ‘How many lion parts are there?’ he quipped when he left town.” —John Lahr, the son of the actor who played Oz’s Cowardly Lion, on a new oral history of Hollywood, in the LRB
“In the paperwork Mick had initialled on the day of the surgery, a clause said, ‘The clinic highly discourages seeking information elsewhere as the information provided can be false, misleading, and inaccurate.’ One day, though, Mick opened Google and searched ‘Elist,’ ‘Penuma,’ ‘numb.’ ‘I was looking for people to tell me, “Oh, yeah, I waited three months, and now everything’s fine, I am very happy,” ’ he said. Those people were hard to find.” —Ava Kofman in The New Yorker on the cutthroat, predatory world of penis-enlargement surgery (not an article for the squeamish!)