A check fully made out for $375.15 dollars, a traffic ticket for jaywalking, to-do lists with some very curious items like “pick up the whip” or “explain cremation.”

  There is a pawnshop in Danbury, Connecticut, that I frequent. Like most pawnshops, it is at once depressing and intriguing. I often check out pawnshops out of a foolhardy belief that I will find treasure. I used to scour flea markets with th…

  In Danbury, Connecticut, off Interstate 84, there is an overpass festooned with graffiti scribbles. They have been there for three decades. No one has thought to erase them and, as far as I can tell, no one has added to them. The graffiti is…

The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we're reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday!  I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, based solely on the fact that I ador…

  Chalk it up to synchronicity, but within an hour I opened a package in my mailbox and found a patch I ordered for my baseball cap that says, BECAUSE FUCK YOU, THAT’S WHY. Then I drove half a mile into town and saw a new store about to o…

  I confess I am not by nature an early adopter. I still like manual typewriters, stick-shift cars, and simple appliances with on and off buttons instead of confusing symbols. I still do not know how to text. I am, however, very proud that I …

I can think of no good reason why I should buy a digital desert-camo elastic Molle strapped combat backpack, but I did. Two.

To make a memorial on a public highway bothers lawyers and government bureaucrats. They see the roadside memorials as something on the level of graffiti.

I cremate my dogs out of respect for them—but having respected so many over the years, I now have tins and urns filled with their ashes all over the place.

There are so many ways to be ill: Cat’s Cry Syndrome, Precocious Puberty Syndrome, Geographic Tongue, Maple Syrup Urine Disease, and more.

Jane Stern on her local hardware store, whose customers have mistaken her for various E- and F-list celebrities.

Now, here’s why I’ve decided that I’m constitutionally unable to date: I forgot how to do it. All I could remember was that it was critical to keep the conversation rolling.

Twice a year, I must reset my Subaru’s truly impenetrable clock, with its three black levers and corresponding icons like the rings of Saturn.

The evolution of dog food: from slaughterhouse sweepings to gourmet feast.

Modern fame needs scores of minders and fluffers, bodyguards and publicists; for Stringbean it required nothing but the man and his banjo.

I look like crap. I had to take drastic measures. I went on YouTube.

Camera pans to small object on the horizon. Slow zoom to pristine white rectangle. It is the sole survivor of the apocalypse. It is My Pillow.

Do Reptilian overlords control the Earth? David Icke certainly thinks so, and maybe he’s onto something.

Our Winter 2015 issue features an interview with Jane and Michael Stern, who have written more than forty books; their Roadfood, first published in 1978 and now in its eighth edition, brought a new fervor and attention to regional American cuisine. …