Monster, Naoki Urasawa’s serial-killer manga masterpiece, is pure storytelling. Within a few minutes of opening volume one, I knew that until I finished all nine volumes of the “perfect edition”—a couple thousand pages of text and panels—I would not know peace. And so, for a few days, reading Monster became my job. Relentlessly engaging, getting deeper and darker, more horrifying and beautiful with every turn, this is a perfect example of a story that operates as a machine for making the reader want to know what happens next. To know Monster at all is to become obsessed. —Justin Kuritzkes
Why a Man Should Be Well-Dressed by Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos is the godfather of modern architecture. He also had a lot of thoughts about pants, ties, footwear, hats, underwear, dandyism, English tailoring, the loathsome habits of Germans, and much more, which he shared in regular tongue-in-cheek screeds as if he were the Menswear Guy of fin de siècle Vienna. Some of the debates over things like top hat height seem like they were vicious, and Loos’s own devotion to dressing in a contemporary fashion was amusingly radical. (The chapbook of translated essays opens with Loos declaring that if he lived in the age of togas rather than trousers he would surely be driven to suicide.) And though his takedown of the Viennese Association of Hat Fashion might not hit today, the architect’s insights into how clothing was modernizing during a time of rapid social upheaval still resonates. Above all, Loos reminds us that dudes have been arguing about clothes for hundreds of years, and will for hundreds more. —Samuel Hine
Adam Driver, as a concept
Courtesy of Lions Gate / Everett Collection
