We will call her "Lydia Bearback." Lydia Bearback and I were elementary classmates on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in a town called Browning, Montana. Browning is a small town in Northern Montana with a population of a whisker over 1000. Like most Indian reservations on the Great Plains, the Blackfeet Reservation was governmentally engineered to be poor, and my family was poorer than most. Destructive public policies have decimated Indigenous economies. These policies, combined with utterly remote geographic location, have led to 70 percent unemployment for decades. "Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated," General Sherman said, "as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance."

Writer/incendiary tweeter Bret Easton Ellis has written almost 3,500 words for Out on the media's treatment of gay men and his banning* from last month's GLAAD Awards because of his controversial tweets. These words are angry, self-serving, contradictory, justified, and human beyond gay. Out has agreed to let us to excerpt his essay, which is titled, "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves." See below.

Sometime in April 2010, my father, Victor, a veteran who spent most of his life as an engineer, hanged himself in a garage in Blackwood, New Jersey. He and my mother, Marguerite, had a thing in the late 1970’s. That thing bore me.

Five years off Adderall and Dexedrine and I’m still in withdrawal.

By now, most high school seniors planning to attend college in the fall have selected their chosen institute of higher education. It’s an exciting time for you, Wildcats '13, and you probably have some questions about your future. Such as, who will I meet? What clubs will I join? What if my roommate only wants to stay in the room eating cold cuts and watching Moesha re-runs? Will I decide to buy a body pillow from Bed Bath and Beyond? (Yes, besides being extremely comfortable body pillows are an excellent way to block you from other people's booger walls). In an effort to get to know each other a little better before the fall rolls around, several members of Columbia University’s future class of 2017 uploaded their college application essays into a shared Google doc. That Google doc, which contains 70 essays that either answer the Columbia essay prompt or the Common app prompt, was then shared with us. And now with you.

Photographs, he likes to say, are the only things that remain.

When I was twenty-four, I flew paper airplanes past the apartment of a thirty-two-year-old white boy named Kurt in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Kurt rocked a greasy brown mullet, bragged about ironing his bleached Lee's, and said the word "yous" a lot. Even with caked-up cornbread sealing the cracks of his teeth, and a raggedy mustache that looked like it was colored by a hyper six-year-old, Kurt always reminded me of somebody cute.

A recently uncovered essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other things on your fifth grade summer reading list, shows that the Scottish writer was kind of a curmudgeon when it came to his contemporaries. Basically, he thought they were such a drag.

Almost two years ago I walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx with my camera. I came because I was told not to go, that it was the poorest neighborhood in all of New York and one of the most violent in all of the United States. I was immediately drawn in by a humanity that transcended the headlines.

The past few months have been full of navel-gazing essays about the relative merits of writers writing navel-gazing essays. Blogger Kate Fridkis weighs in with one more this week—a fairly run-of-the-mill heave in defense of personal writing. One argument in particular deserves to be highlighted:

"Just promise me one thing," my soon to be ex-husband says.

"Do you want to die?" the man asks me. He stands on the steps leading to my front porch with a stack of literature in his arms. He is wearing a suit that probably looked sharp 15 years ago. Home laundering has taken its toll. The fabric is pilled, the seams are droopy. A middle-aged woman in an ankle-length skirt stands on the walkway a few feet behind him. Her hair and makeup-free face are the same washed-out color. These people have been coming to my door for several months now. Before this pair, it was another. I've collected a small stack of issues of The Watchtower, their primary publication.

I was about to fold a pair of jacks when my little brother died. I was seated at a round table in the hospital waiting room with two cousins and my brother-in-law, taking a break from the prayer meeting my family had convened in the adjoining space. Not a very Christian way to avoid the assembly, in retrospect, but we were playing for artificial sweetener packets, so it wasn't really gambling. Besides, that level of deep and intense intercession is draining. I was exhausted, and I was losing, and then the room went weirdly quiet.

After an intense six-week training program, the only thing that stands between Aaron Alton and a $90,000 fracking job is a commercial driver's license. It's August of 2012. The job, at a natural gas drilling company, is Aaron's ticket out of Harrisburg, PA.

In Murgatroid, Ohio—a perfectly average small American town, in a perfectly average American state, where perfectly average Americans do not so average things—the day begins, as it does elsewhere, with alarm clocks, the cries of cuckoo birds, and the collective "Thshhh" sound of apple pies being thrust onto windowsills from North Snooker Street all the way down to South Shoobadoop Avenue. The sun's rays, golden in that way that rays are, peek over the horizon. It is morning in Murgatroid. Once again, a small town full of Americans bestirs itself for the unexpectedly inspiring day ahead.

Have you been cracking wise about our cherished field of Republican presidential candidates? Perhaps calling them "assholes" when they do and say horrible things? Let's grow up already. Because stilted CNN misery bot Wolf Blitzer will surely put us in detention if this goes on much longer.

You know how, when you applied for college, you sent the same bromide "Why I want to go to _____ University" essay to every school, because all colleges are interchangeable anyway? Turns out John F. Kennedy thought so, too.

The prolific British-American writer Christopher Hitchens was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which is a very bad cancer. In a new Vanity Fair essay, Hitchens writes about his disease, including his miserable day leading up to a Daily Show taping.

John Walter was a longtime newspaperman and a founding editor of USA Today. He died last September, but not before writing this bullshit-free essay on the three guys who killed newspapers. The short version:

Michael Hirschorn writes the single most insightful and plausible essay yet on the probable coming decline, fall, and (perhaps) rebirth of the New York Times. You reading, Pinch? [The Atlantic]