"WHO IS Julia Fox?” This is the question taken up by Fox’s highly anticipated memoir Down the Drain (Simon & Schuster, $29)—so highly anticipated, in fact, that I was required to sign an NDA promising I wouldn’t leak any details from the press copy I received, the plain white cover of which read only, enticingly, EMBARGOED. It was also the question some of my, frankly, uncool friends and acquaintances asked me when I excitedly told them I was reviewing Fox’s book. “Josh Safdie’s muse?” I prompted. “Actually, she’s her own muse. You know . . . Uncut Gems?” I pronounced it “unkah jamz,” as Fox

WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. 

Which brings me to Janet

BEYOND AN OLDER SIBLING’S headphones wringing the sweet, distorted fuzz of the Velvet Underground out and into my ears, my second most notable encounter with Lou Reed was in the pages of the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which has a whole section dedicated to Bangs and his relentless sparring with Reed. A book within a book, almost. There are two interviews that would, today, seem alarming in both their approach and the nature of their candidness, with Bangs demeaning Reed’s pal David Bowie, Reed taking the bait, Bangs shouting that Reed is full of shit. The

A FRIEND OF MINE—the Canadian scholar of Buddhism David Drewes—once observed that we exist at different levels of magnification. Every moment of existence is susceptible to practically infinite expansion—or to shrinking almost to nothingness. We mostly speak and think at a conventional degree of magnification where experience appears to fit into conveniently labeled boxes—“tired,” “successful,” “female,” etc. But around the time that science was discovering the mysteries of cosmic scale—the fact that surfaces, for example, exist at some levels of magnification, but not at others—writers began

IF YOU WERE TO HAVE TWO MEN FIGHT EACH OTHER with a minimum of rules, should they do it in a boxing ring, or a plexiglass cube, or a cage (and maybe an electrified one)? These were the novel logistical questions faced by the founders of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, including a used-car salesman turned ad mogul and a Brazilian described by Playboy as “the toughest man in the United States,” as they attempted to identify what form of martial art was most effective at incapacitating an opponent. Inspired by a Chuck Norris flick, they chose the cage—no electricity—to determine whether, say,

WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, safely to the other side, in a single bound. It was then that, exhaling, I realized