Beyond what increasingly appear to be the inherent and horrifying physical effects of long-term play on its athletes, there is the unavoidable fact of their exploitation: College players go uncompensated by rule, while TV networks, coaches and apparel companies make money hand over fist on the players’ talent.
If the governess is mad, she has unwittingly killed a bright and beautiful little boy; this is a tragedy, but a local one. If the ghosts are genuine, however, there are jagged cracks in the firmament above us all, and nobody is safe.
On 20 February 1938, the Sunday Pictorial carried a report of a haunting in Croydon. A 34-year-old housewife had called to tell them about strange events at the home she shared with her husband Les, her son Don and their lodger, George Saunders. Come to my house, Alma Fielding implored the Pictorial’s news desk. There are things going on here I cannot explain.
Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom.
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again.
It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. There are so many trust-fund kids running around, said Saleh. Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.
The day after ‘Endless Appetizers’ was announced, I went to TGI Friday's in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. I wanted to challenge the hubris of a company co-opting the infinite for a marketing gimmick. I wanted to demand accountability from copywriters. I wanted to call their bluff and eat appetizers until they kicked me out, to seek the limit of this supposedly limitless publicity stunt. I soon learned the limit does not exist.
Mr Morley had gone in with an open mind about the death penalty, but for me it was a total emotional shock; so callous, so dreadful, so horrific . . . Everyone was traumatised, everyone who saw it. My wife said I was a real mess for a long time afterwards.
It makes sense that 50 percent of horror audiences are women, because it’s a world where we exist. Yes, it’s also a world that’s constantly traumatizing and murdering us, which refuses to imagine women as more than the sum of the events that are happening right now, whose plots frequently hinge on a man who doesn’t believe a woman when she says she’s seen a ghost when we, the viewers, have all seen the ghost too, so we definitely know the ghost is there.
The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 20th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
It was indubitable—rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all-fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit.
