William Stobb

There are so many things to love about "Welcome to Night Vale," the very original podcast created and co-written by Joseph Fink along with Jeffrey Cranor, and voiced by Cecil Baldwin. If you're not familiar with it, each episode takes the form of a community radio broadcast from the fictional desert town of Night Vale.  News, local announcements, traffic, and "weather," emanating from a town where existence is multi-dimensional, metaphysical, metaphorical and deeply, delightfully, quirkily spooky. Now 40 episodes and almost two years in, Night Vale remains fresh and original, featuring regular developments surrounding the mysterious dog park, which must neither be entered nor even acknowledged to exist, the glow cloud that has become a member of Night Vale's city council, the man in the tan jacket with the deerskin suitcase full of trained flies, and the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house. For me, the show's quick-witted conceptual o...

              Spoon River Poetry Review               Editors' Prize winner A Moment for Authentic Shine This is the greatest moment of your life, said the voice both familiar and distant, like a childhood friend become spokesperson for a cleaning product— which caused the many hats to turn in many directions and one robed arm to extend. And what after all had been passing? The sounds birds made often seemed more cogent than the swirl of argument, a cyclone in a sandbox.   So much management we ought to have degrees was a type of joke made at outmoded parties. Still with shades and declarations echoes of heroic solos translated out of urgent decades while almost unnoticed, pensive tunes accumulate in the mix like thunder clouds on these warmer days.   Regardless, the names come unpinned, stars die, a closetful of semi- recognizable jackets and hats be-speaks the by...

Since 2004, men have been growing mustaches during the month of November to raise awareness about prostate cancer.  This is a good idea in certain obvious ways--people should think about prostate cancer.  Men should get exams after the age of 40--I think that's the recommendation. But it's a bad idea in one clear way: it's gross.  When you see a man sporting an especially bushy Mo-vember stache, you can't help but see, for a brief, horrible moment, his whole facial apparatus as a metaphor for the traditional prostate access point.  You know what I'm saying.  For a month every year, a whole world full of smiling face-anus assemblages. Here's what I propose: let's switch it up.  Let's make August prostate awareness month, sponsored by Speedo.  At the beach, mowing the lawn, walking the poodle in the heat of the afternoon, men can wear Speedos for prostate awareness.  We can even sell special Speedos with a word across the butt, like... I dunno....

The original Planet of the Apes is a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle.  I've read it.  It's okay.  I guess Pierre Boulle wrote some other spy novels, and those were pretty good, and he was in love with a married woman, who promised to leave her husband, but ultimately went back to him, and so Pierre Boulle had to go on with a hole in his heart.  But his apes have gone on for fifty years, fascinating us. I always preferred the Planet of the Apes movies to the later sci-fi bonanzas, the Star Wars movies.  The Planet movies weren't exaggerated fairy tales--they were difficult, and dark, and they showed a future that had gotten out of control.  That seemed, I guess, more persuasive to me than the heroic blah-blah-blah of the Star Wars franchise. One time, when I was six, I was at my friend Dane Peterson's house with a couple other kids, and Dane's older brother Paul was putting us through an "astronaut training" cycle in Dane's basement.  We had to run do...

This week in America, a 19-year-old college quarterback is in the news.  He's a big star, and he's acting irreverently--partying and unabashedly enjoying the spotlight. I laugh, thinking about my own 19-year-old self: a socially awkward college sophomore spending inordinate amounts of time in the library basement, reading all the uncollected Salinger stories in Collier's and Saturday Evening Post on microfiche. It was not a glamorous time.  I felt like Salinger's witty, vulnerable young characters had leapt directly from my own adolescent loneliness onto the page.  When I look back at them now, which I tend to do about once every summer, I sometimes find them a little hyperbolic, or idealized.  But I still feel how much those characters--not so much Holden Caulfield, but more the Glass family, and the characters in the short stories--meant to me as a young adult, and the gratitude I feel toward them quiets my inner pedant. One of the highlights of my 2013 summe...

A few weeks ago I wrote a post suggesting that the mathematical concept of zero may interfere with our understanding of the physical world around us.  Because of zero, maybe we believe that there's a  smallest thing--that there's a floor, a hard limit on the low end of sizes, distances, and quantities--when in fact, that may not be true.  Every point of matter--every atom--may contain infinite regress within it.  Or... the concepts of "large" or "small" or "inward" and "outward" may simply not be well-founded. Just after writing that post, I caught Radiolab's "The Trouble with Everything."   In the second half of the episode, Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich argues with Columbia physicist Brian Greene.  Now that physics suggests that there may be infinite possible universes (there's no reason to think that the big bang happened only once, in one location, i.e., our universe), Krulwich argues, the dream that Physics...