I saw Monster Head on the 8:15 PATH train from Journal Square, sitting on the last seat in the car, facing the door like everybody else who had mismanaged his life into commuting.

Journal Square had its usual morning mood: wet concrete, bad lighting, old tile, and the low civic hum of people trying not to make eye contact before Manhattan. It was the same station they dressed up as Osaka in one of the John Wick movies, which feels right. Jersey City has always been good at passing for somewhere stranger and more cinematic, especially before breakfast.

NEW YORK — A disgusting new internet plague called “looksmaxxing” has young men sanding, sculpting, plucking, starving, pumping, moisturizing, and photographing themselves like desperate little peacocks in a digital meat market, all while pretending it’s about discipline. It isn’t. It’s about male approval, plain and simple…

NEW YORK — In August 1984, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham gathered a panel of literary types, feminists, civil libertarians, and professional pearl-clutchers to ask the eternal American question: what is pornography, and should somebody stop it?

Sitting in the middle of all that respectable handwringing was Al Goldstein, founder and publisher of SCREW, who did what Al always did when the cultured class tried to put sex in a cage. He blew the lock off. Asked to define pornography, Al said, simply, “I don’t know what pornography is. I haven’t a clue.”

It was the smartest thing said all afternoon…