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Nonrequired Conversations

My essay “Conversations You Have at Twenty” was apparently shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009. (Thanks for telling me, Alexi.)

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Satan for kids, or Get thee behind me, Pikachu!

This children’s book on ritual abuse — a product, no doubt, of the ’80s Satanism scare — is the kind of thing my mom would have sold at her ¨ber-fundamentalist bookstore alongside the Jack Chick tracts and Dungeons and Dragons exposés, so for me it inspires a dull sort of dread rather than surprise or amusement. (Via.) Even I was . . .

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A Ballardian childhood

J.G. Ballard raised his children alone after his wife’s death. The Guardian publishes his daughter’s eulogy.

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