The Believer

Issue 155 is live! Open this thread for a look at our fall issue, which features indie wrestling, “Body Alchemy,” Contact Improv, @katiekitamura.bsky.social, Kurt Vile, @tricialockwood.bsky.social, PJ Harvey as Mary Magdalene, and much more: www.thebeliever.net/product/fall...

“What happens when the story of self is met with a ‘proverbial shrug’?” In the second installment of her new web column on speechwriting, Leah Abrams probes the limits of the rhetorical model Obama used to introduce himself to America in ‘08.

“Anxiety is fear of the unknown, of that which cannot be controlled or predicted. Benzodiazepine withdrawal is an extended assault by the uncontrollable and the unpredicted. This seems especially cruel.” —Brad Phillips, “The Other Epidemic”: www.thebeliever.net/the-other-ep...

Why do we so desperately need to know the details of Kafka’s life? From our archive: www.thebeliever.net/the-man-who-...

“In 1932, when Marinetti and his fellow Futurists scanned the horizon for another bastion of Italian culture begging for modernization, they chose to publish not just a cookbook, but one violently opposed to the mainstay of Italian cuisine: pasta.” www.thebeliever.net/a-futurist-b...

“I want to write off dance forever, but before I can, I must understand why people love it, and what I might be missing out on by refusing to join in. I believe that contempt prior to a thorough investigation is the way of the coward.” www.thebeliever.net/hanging-by-m...

“Listers compared notes. Rain trousers hissed. Enormous telephoto lenses swung like toy rifles or Les Paul guitars.” Randle Browning embarks on a pelagic with some of America’s most dedicated birders: www.thebeliever.net/how-to-watch...

“When a fellow writer in the Copenhagen scene admits that he is jealous of Glenn’s ‘material,’ but ‘less so of my having worked myself to death to finally have found my way to some kind of form,’ Glenn seethes, ‘Thanks… and fuck off.’”

“When I was working on a draft it used to become a rhythmic chant in my mind, lyrics backed by the percussive sound of tapping keys: Hook, Problem, Solution, Visualization, Call to Action…” From Leah Abrams’s web-exclusive column on speechwriting: www.thebeliever.net/rhetor-ick-m...

“Something is clearly happening… These are things driven by the intelligentsia, and they’re running out of senses.” Biophysicist and writer @lucaturin.bsky.social on perfume as an object of criticism: www.thebeliever.net/a-microinter...

“You might whisper, if you are one of this novel’s legion of quiet evangelists: Have you ever been so seduced by hope that you put your body on the line?” An original cover for “Fat City” by Liniers, with an essay on the novel by Peter Orner: www.thebeliever.net/end-notes-fa...

“Thinking about how the marigolds get along with the brassicas and red pole beans so the shade doesn’t damage the heat-loving crops. All that is art.” From an interview with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

The first installment of Leah Abrams’s column on speechwriting is free to read on our Substack:

“The truth of who a person is emerges precisely at that moment when they’re rupturing the linear progression of: These things happened, and I am this person because of this constellation of events, and therefore x, y, and z.” www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“It took just two days on a smaller dose of Klonopin to feel profoundly uncomfortable. My hands were tingling, and I couldn’t stop sweating. I could still exercise, write, bathe, and cook meals. Within a week I could do none of those things.” www.thebeliever.net/the-other-ep...

“For the wrestlers, nuance existed not in the ring but in the nebulous space between themselves and their gimmicks.” Katherine Cusumano spends a year on the indie professional wrestling circuit with Drexl and Amira Lukens: www.thebeliever.net/the-work/

Get 15% off a print or digital subscription to The Believer with promo code “Leah Abrams.” Subscriptions include new issues, web exclusives like Leah Abrams’s new column Rhetor-ick, and access to our full archive. store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the...

“Let’s not mince words: Macklemore is a corny rapper… Yet, look at this statement, a perfect specimen of persuasive rhetoric.” Former speechwriter Leah Abrams examines one practitioner of Alan H. Monroe’s cheat code to rhetoric: www.thebeliever.net/rhetor-ick-m...

“These medications are popular because they’re effective in the short term, and because the damage they cause has remained hidden. That’s changing.” Brad Phillips on benzo withdrawal: www.thebeliever.net/the-other-ep...

In her new column Rhetor-ick, former speechwriter Leah Abrams brings her craft expertise to speeches and statements by politicians, pundits, and everyday people. First up: Macklemore, balāgha, and a blueprint for speechwriting. www.thebeliever.net/rhetor-ick-m...

“It’s a magical thing to re-create a photo from a hundred years ago that has so much political relevance, at the exact location.” Filmmaker Igor Bezinović on the making of his film “Fiume o morte!,” about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Rijeka, Croatia: www.thebeliever.net/the-process-...

“I didn’t do an MFA. I worked on this documentary series for English television called ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,’ which was about psychoanalysis…. And then once I did that, I felt ready to start writing a book.” www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“I’m making this book out to be sad as all hell... There’s despair, sure, pages of some of the most glorious despair you’ll ever read. There are also laughs like punches to Lucero’s kidney.” Peter Orner on “Fat City,” with art by Liniers: www.thebeliever.net/end-notes-fa...

“I’ve never met anyone who saw it unless I forced them to, but it remains one of my favorite movies for its sheer coolness and ability to make me cry.” @debolinunferth.bsky.social on Hal Hartley’s 1998 film “The Book of Life”: www.thebeliever.net/resurrector-...

An intimate and fear-based investigation into our strangest dance form—Contact Improv: www.thebeliever.net/hanging-by-m...

“If you had a second self—tethered to your feet like a shadow, and just the same as you but brighter, more powerful… all the dials turned up until the distortion fuzzed you out entirely—wouldn’t you embrace her too?” www.thebeliever.net/the-work/

“Instead of moving the plot from the inexplicable to either the rational or the absurd, Bonomini’s literature lingers in the forest of the unknown.” Pablo Calvi on Ángel Bonomini’s “Slow Elephants of Milan”: www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-...

“I try to transmute my consciousness into a pure physical form, a preverbal élan vital. I close my eyes. I can hear my classmates slithering around, so I rock, just barely, from side to side. I feel no inspiration to move at all…” On Contact Improv: www.thebeliever.net/hanging-by-m...

“He said to me, ‘You seem to actually be interested in perfumes, as opposed to being just a hack.’ He thought it was very strange: He didn’t see very many people like me, but they’d publish the book.” Luca Turin on his first perfume guide: www.thebeliever.net/a-microinter...

“Once you establish the contours of a murder mystery… I think you can drop the engine and still have forward momentum. That’s how I thought about A Separation… You get that initial burst of momentum, and then you drift into space.” www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

As a growing cohort of physicians reevaluate the costs of benzodiazepine withdrawal, the author charts his all-consuming symptoms: www.thebeliever.net/the-other-ep...

“Then and now, the most marginalized are painted as criminals, while those with the least to lose are considered victims in this charade.” @laurenleblanc.bsky.social on Olga Ravn’s “The Wax Child,” a novel inspired by Scandinavia’s 17th-century witch trials: www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-...

“What is a lady? A lady is someone who gets a free car wash and a carnation with an oil change on Wednesdays at Vermont Quick Lube.” Chelsea Edgar on the best oil-change shop in central Vermont: www.thebeliever.net/place-vermon...

“These are actors; they know the lines. What they’re doing is enhancing them. But they’re in the moment; the character is adding to the lines, not the actor.” Alex Ross Perry on directing Jason Schwartzman and Elisabeth Moss: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“When you dismantle and focus only on what you’re not about, it’s hard to point to anything concrete in the world that you’re trying to build… We’re trying to pilot the world we want to see a little bit here.” From an interview with Leah Penniman: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“The goal is not cooperation, but rather an exploration of the nearly infinite permutations of movement available to a pair of dancers who’ve finely tuned their senses so they can respond intuitively to each unplanned moment… Touch is their only guide.” www.thebeliever.net/hanging-by-m...

“There are two driving forces in [Ángel] Bonomini’s writing: the hope of an explanatory light at the end of the fantastical tunnel, and the maximalism of his poetry, which wraps the reader like a cold, dense quilt of ocher and blue.” www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-...

“I want to tell our younger selves we are not little / mothers. There is no world where we blink away the heavy we can’t / name.” From “Pinary Abecedarian,” a new poem in Issue 155 by Janice Lobo Sapigao: www.thebeliever.net/pinay-abeced...

“Even the nudes, of trans women showing their breasts and genitals, for example, are captured in poses neither erotic nor obscene, just, again, casually human.” @sandyernestallen.bsky.social revisits Loren Rex Cameron’s classic photography book, “Body Alchemy”: www.thebeliever.net/looking-for-...

The world of independent professional wrestling is grueling and often thankless, but in a select few, it inspires monastic devotion: www.thebeliever.net/the-work/

“‘Fat City’ is a hand-to-hand book, the kind you give to a lifelong comrade, someone whose stories leave you simultaneously bereft and laughing.” Peter Orner on Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City,” with a new cover by Liniers: www.thebeliever.net/end-notes-fa...

“After someone dies, does what’s left just keep getting smaller? How can he protect what’s left of his mother?” Ben Bush reviews “Hold Still” by @benehrenreich.bsky.social for Issue 155: www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-...

“Only more recently did I start listening to Kurt Weill and [his collaborator] Bertolt Brecht. I have a little CD box set, and it is as good as they say.” From Issue 155, Kurt Vile on his homophonous counterpart: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“As a reader, you tend to look for the character that you feel is in some way like you. Even when you know better.” @katiekitamura.bsky.social, interviewed in Issue 155 by @patrickcottrell.bsky.social: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“The movie is so rock-and-roll. The score takes over the film with eerie plainsongs and rock ballads. Yo La Tengo shows up as a Salvation Army band beating out the tune of lonely America. PJ Harvey sings to herself like an angel.” www.thebeliever.net/resurrector-...

“They’ve talked about every other goddamn thing… So now the locusts of academia, having laid waste to the other senses, are flying around scent. They’re welcome to it.” Biophysicist and perfume critic @lucaturin.bsky.social, interviewed by Sara Black McCulloch: www.thebeliever.net/a-microinter...

“Reading the first hundred pages of ‘The Fathership’ feels like hanging on for dear life while perched on a dog toy that’s being shaken violently in the jaws of an irate husky.” Shruti Ravindran on Glenn Bech’s debut novel: www.thebeliever.net/a-review-of-...

“But it might not matter. Also: might be Me. Humans aren’t meant to read three A day, that’s what killed Art Garfunkel.” From “The Books Are Bad,” a new poem by @tricialockwood.bsky.social in Issue 155: www.thebeliever.net/the-books-ar...

Hear from the wrestlers, then read @k-e-c.bsky.social’s essay on a year spent following the Pacific Northwest’s indie professional wrestling circuit: www.thebeliever.net/the-work/

Derek Drexl and Amira Lukens, two of the wrestlers featured in @k-e-c.bsky.social’s new essay “The Work,” went on @opb.org’s “Think Out Loud” to talk indie wrestling and share match stories: www.opb.org/article/2026...