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Britny Fox was a terrible hair metal band that had scored a hit earlier in the ’90s with a song called “Girlschool.” It featured a classroom full of Catholic schoolgirls gyrating to the beat in defiance of a stern teacher. They roll up their shirts to expose their abs, and muss their hair, but they don’t go any further—there isn’t anywhere further to go. More…

I knew lots of people like that—unloved because unlovable. Toward them I was always cold. Maybe I held them at arm’s length to disguise from myself our shared predicament. And so, by trying to disguise something from yourself, you declare it to everyone else—because part of what makes a person unlovable is his inability to love. More…

When I was in elementary school, we used to play a game that was called “Would you prefer to be frozen or burned alive?” At the time, I always chose frozen. It seemed like it would be possible to just curl up in the snow and die, which I had read about in White Fang. Whereas with burning, what I really imagined was boiling—in a big pot. More…

Outside of New Jersey, the loudest (until now) political firestorm of the James McGreevey administration came from an unexpected source. The Governor wound up getting publicly scourged not, as he had before and would again, for being a water-carrier for wealthy men, but for lending the state’s endorsement to an irresponsible poet. More…