CASE Magazine

Alert, earthlings. The entire pre-2015 CASE Mag archive is now available in this WordPress repository. Read all your faves from years past.

CASE magazine anecdotal cultural criticism

Cara Giaimo writes from the depths of the California woods on adaptation, human and otherwise, at Autostraddle q***r camp.

"It's wonderful to watch people who have spent years making micro-adjustments finally let go a little bit, wear what they want to wear and use the words they want to use without constantly keeping an eye out for circling hawks."

http://casemagazine.net/recently/where-the-birds-all-have-mohawks

Where The Birds All Have Mohawks By Cara Giaimo When you first get dressed in the morning, you feel dressed. But within a few minutes, all your nerves get used to your clothes, and begin ignoring them in order to focus on more important things. The brain works similarly -- live your life in the same place every day, and that place…

Today, Mel Mignucci on Chipotle Mexican Grill's current foray into flash fiction: "The issue is the reduction of literature to the puzzle on the back of a cereal box, something ancillary to the real product."

An Open Letter to Chipotle by Mel Mignucci Dear Chipotle, my old friend, It’s been a while since we’ve last talked. I’ll admit, I haven’t been too faithful – the burrito stand in my college town, while not as reliable as you, has a kind of endearing kitschiness about it (and is closer than the Chipotle in Kingston). This prol…

"He starts screaming and snorting into the microphone, like the old Ultimate Warrior, but his face is sweaty and his mask cheap; it begins riding up his face, obscuring his eyes partly. Eventually, he can barely see, but the crowd is cheering, the crowd adores him, and if he was self-conscious to begin, he at some point loses himself, lets loose and starts saying insane things about death and immortality and blood pumping through veins, and by the time he’s yelling about the Ultimate Warrior living forever, I realize that the awkward, fragile man in the ring was always somehow awkward, always in some way fragile, and we always played along regardless."

Load The Spaceship: On Loving, Losing, and Finding the Ultimate Warrior By Michael J. Harrington The first assignment from my first fiction writing professor wasn’t some involved free writing exercise or a read through of the Elements of Style, but instead a list: write down the first 5 books you ever read. My plan to impress the authorial socks off my professor quickly…