David Samuels, in The Atlantic:

Quinton Jackson wears a steel bicycle chain around his neck, has a tattoo of a black panther on his enormous bicep, and has a tendency to howl like a wolf. He is also born-again, the loving father of four children -- and known for delivering the hardest blow in the history of professional sports. Now, in attempting to defend his Ultimate Fighting Championship title, he is also trying to hold onto his sanity. An intimate portrait of a mixed martial artist -- and of the growing American fixation with the warriors who earn their living beating each other bloody.

From the archive:

I’ve decided to start prude-proofing myself via a series of daily micro-immersions in sex and violence.

Not everyone will want to face this much misery.

"Look, let me go back in there and face the peril."

"No, it's too perilous."

"I have girlfriends that love gratuitous violence, blood and gore and people getting carved to pieces," she said.

"If the industry won't protect our children from gratuitous violence and indecency, then we must act."

The violence in Vice City is completely tuitous.

David Samuels offers a knife-sharp pen portrait:

The pay-per-view broadcast starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday night and goes until ten. By five, maybe 3,000 people are already in their seats, most of them gathered in the upper reaches of the arena.

Behind us, Tito Ortiz and Jenna Jameson are taking their seats. Ortiz’s face looks puffier than it did when he was fighting regularly, while the famous porn star looks ghastly. Her stick-figure legs are covered with tattoos, and a pair of angel wings sprouts from her back. Her eyes make her look like a Siamese cat, less vacant than otherworldly. She talks to Ortiz, greets her fans, looks exasperated, and plays with her hair, but the weird look in her eyes never goes away. It’s like she is looking into an arctic hell where the sun never shines.

Ouch.

From the archive:

The distant future evolution of our Sun might be controlled (literally, asteroengineered) so that it maintains its present-day energy output rather than becoming a highly luminous and bloated red giant.

I wonder if you could create a meth algorithm to alter photos of people so that they looked like they took it.

Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

Many sit vacant and dilapidated for months as lenders go through the process of taking them back through foreclosure and then putting them on the market.