1. A version of “Girl on a Motorcycle” appeared in She’s a Bad Motorcycle: Writers on Riding (Da Capo, 2001).
  2. “We Are Orphans Here” appeared in the New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2016; Kingdom of Olives and Ash (HarperCollins, 2017), edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman; and Leslie Jamison, ed., The Best American Essays 2017 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
  3. “Earth Angel: Denis Johnson’s Final Book of Fiction,” Bookforum (February/March 2018).
  4. “In the Company of Truckers,” New York Times Magazine, February 19, 2014.
  5. “Bad Captains,” London Review of Books, no. 22 (January 2015).
  6. “Happy Hour,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014.
  7. “Tramping in the Byways” appeared as the afterword to How I Became One of the Invisible, by David Rattray (Semiotext(e), 2019).
  8. “Flying Cars,” from Matthew Porter: The Heights (Aperture Books, 2019).
  9. “Picture-Book Horses” appeared as the introduction to The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy (Picador UK, 2018).
  10. “Not with the Band”: a much shorter, altered version originally appeared in Vogue, May 2018.
  11. A version of “Made to Burn” originally appeared in the Paris Review, issue 203 (Winter 2012).
  12. “Popular Mechanics” is developed and lengthened from a preface to We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini (Verso, 2016) and “Nanni Balestrini, 1935–2019,” Commune Magazine, fall 2019.
  13. “The Sinking of the HMS Bounty” is a revised and extended version of an essay from a catalog for an exhibition by Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge, and Anna Viebrock, The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied., Fondazione Prada, 2017.
  14. “Duras with an S” is developed and lengthened from a foreword to The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities by Marguerite Duras, Everyman’s Library edition (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018); it also appeared as “A Man and a Woman, Say What You Like, They’re Different,” New Yorker pageturner, November 10, 2017.
  15. “Is Prison Necessary?,” New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2019.
  16. “Woman in Revolt,” Artforum 51, no. 3 (November 2012).
  17. “Lipstick Traces,” Bookforum (December/January 2013).
  18. “Bunny” is developed and lengthened from “Passages: Alex Brown,” Artforum 57, no. 8 (April 2019).