Stories of Theft and Loss

In The Stoneslide Corrective No. 1, we included a number of short narratives that all revolved around acts of theft. They were adapted from the records of the Old Bailey, a criminal court in London. The way we came to this may seem obscure. It started with the idea of collection. The magazine itself was […]

Frontiers of Knowledge

The Sadness of Seeing Corruption Punished

When you see a man like Sepp Blatter, or any of his fellow grandees in the international soccer regulatory body FIFA, laid low by corruption charges, it is not shameful to shed a tear or two. Recent research is showing that self-interested and exploitative behavior by elites, like the actions of the FIFA boys, is value-creating and in some cases even heroic.

A Life Examined

Pastor Uses Tools of Wall Street to Get People into Heaven

Evangelical preacher Johnny Gawn says his life’s work is to usher as many souls as possible through the Pearly Gates. And now he’s devised a way to guarantee success, at a very reasonable cost.

A Life Examined

Testimonials We’ll Never Hear

A Life Examined

Never Go on a Bad Date with Paper Bag 2.0

Another ho-hum date; a date that makes you think perhaps your ex wasn’t so bad after all. Here you are feeling the same way about this person and the one you went to dinner with last week and the one you sat next to in the movies the week before as you did about your […]

A Life Examined

An Adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by a Middle Manager, Chapter Two

There is a 6,345-square-foot home, with marble-tiled bathrooms, fully integrated home entertainment technology, and a professional-level gas grill, among many other amenities, that sits in a grove-like subdivision a comfortable 15-minute commute from the headquarters of Sterling Performance Limited. Tax registers and other official documents will show that this is the residence of Mr. Anthony J. Sun, the chief financial officer of Sterling.

A Life Examined

Advice on Writing as a Craft and an Art

One attends a huge conference like the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) with hope of gleaning powerful insight into the the craft and art of writing. Yes, there are people to meet and substances to ingest, but mostly the goal is to deepen one’s understanding and perhaps learn new ways of doing things, right?.

This year, at the Minneapolis manifestation of AWP, we paid close attention to the speakers and wrote down all the wisdom we received.

Frontiers of Knowledge

The Venn Diagram to Explain All Venn Diagrams

We recently attended a lecture on the history of propaganda. In fact, the point of the lecture was that history is propaganda–from Alexander the Great’s scribes through Julius Caesar and Napoleon, we can not assuredly separate fact from interpretation from self-generated myth.

But things have changed, you might think. We live in an era of reporting, and impartial fact-finding commissions, and data. All that is just so much persuasion, this speaker argued. Perhaps her most convincing riff was about Venn diagrams and how they appear to present clearly defined, even indisputable information, while actually being arbitrary circles drawn by self-interested PowerPoint users.

A Life Examined

An Adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by a Middle Manager

Sing, muse of the middle reach, goddess who wisely keeps her head down, cringer before the throne of the mighty. Like you, I sit high enough to witness the deeds of the illustrious, and yet I would never try to climb to their heights. Watching is enough for me. Help me tell their stories, and what happens when those who dwell in empyrean splendor touch lives of ordinary plane.

A Life Examined

An Email Home to the Parents of Divine Mercy’s Youth Ministers

The outbursts however continued, demonstrating an astonishing lack of respect for our Savior and the Holy Scripture. Each time a young person would ask a question, three others would respond with bodily noises, wild gesticulations, muffled insults, flying objects, or off-topic comments. My corrections hindered the lesson, so some students decided to take correcting into their own hands and hit fellow students in the face with their Bibles! So discomfiting to see an instrument of peace and instruction used as a bludgeon. At one point I stopped to clarify a passage saying, “Jesus promised He would come back and judge the righteous from the unrighteous.” To this, someone made the outburst, “Well, what if Jesus had His fingers crossed?”

A Life Examined

Top Ten Lowbrow Indulgences for Snobs

1. Memorizing the conversations other people have about television programs, so you can later construct a decent narrative in your mind using the same names and locations.

A Life Examined

A Simple Explanation for Why Things Are So Messed Up All the Time

We have discovered a new principle that explains why so much dysfunction exists and appears to persist or even grow over time: flagrant incompetence attracts power.