Sam Kriss

Sometime in the mid-­seventeenth century, in a quarry in Cornwell, someone found a piece of a much bigger world. It was a bone, the lower part of a thighbone, and it looked almost exactly like the femur of a man. But this bone was enormous: At its widest point, it was two feet across. The specimen . . . . Continue Reading »

What is it like to be a billionaire? I can imagine what it’s like to be a millionaire. I live in London, where millionaires are never very distant. A few of the people I went to school with are millionaires already, and in another decade or so, more of them will be. Millionaires are people who . . . . Continue Reading »

This year, France’s presidential election is being fought almost entirely on the terrain of national identity. Not on the question of who is best suited to govern France, but on the ­question of what France even is to begin with. So much public discourse circles on the same questions: Are we . . . . Continue Reading »

About a decade ago, I would go to a party, get drunk off the kind of alcohol that’s sold in plastic bottles, snort up some dubious research chemicals, and then discover to my horror that I’d just spent the last hour talking to a complete stranger at a high clip about the labor theory of value. I . . . . Continue Reading »

The Ur-Bororo are the most boring people in the world. Their entire population, which is not large, lives in “dwelling sheds,” rectangular clapboard houses in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Other jungle tribes tend to decorate their bodies with elaborate tattoos, lip plugs, or ritual . . . . Continue Reading »

Emma Eckstein was a bleeder: She liked to bleed. She wanted to empty herself out into the world. She was sick and dying, because that was what she desired. This isn’t my interpretation; it’s the analysis offered by her doctor, one Sigmund Freud. Emma was one of Freud’s first patients, but she . . . . Continue Reading »

Does anyone believe in astrology anymore? Is there anyone who still really thinks that our destinies are written in the sky? The answer is probably no. Maybe there’s some ancient black-clad Armenian peasant woman consulting an almanac every time she crosses the street—but for everyone else, . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1980, the soldiers of the Third Reich took Bolivia. After the huge tank battles that had brought about the final victory in Europe, South America was something more like a police operation—in fact, the conquest of the country was led not by the ­Wehrmacht, but by a Hauptsturmführer of the . . . . Continue Reading »

According to the Talmud, the demons are more numerous than we are. “They stand over us like mounds of earth surrounding a pit.” Rav Huna teaches that “each and every one of us has a thousand demons to his left and ten thousand to his right.” Abba Binyamin tells us that “if the eye had the . . . . Continue Reading »