From Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake:

"Unlike other games of the day, which had me leaping through traffic or called me “gumshoe,” Oregon Trail left lots of room for creativity. It seemed ripe for the misuse. Like a precursor to the Sims, you were allowed to name your wagoneers and manipulate their destinies. It didn’t take me long to employ my powers for evil. I would load up the wagon with people I loathed, like my math teacher. Then I would intentionally lose the game, starving her or fording a river with her when I knew she was weak. The program would attempt an intervention, informing me that I had enough buffalo carcass for one day. One more lifeless caribou would make the wagon too heavy, endangering the lives of those inside. Really now? Then how about three more? How about four? Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive plains. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations “nonsensical” in front of fifteen other teenagers. Eventually a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box: mrs.trust has died of dysentery. This filled me with glee.


...Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are."

From Confessions of a Contemplative New Yorker:

"A precursor to the Sims (which I love and secretly play now) in Oregon Trail you had control over the characters. On the occasion of a particularly bad day, I would run down to the lab and load up my wagon with people that had pissed me off and purposely lose the game. Oh no! Lil’ Billy has two broken limbs and was carried away by Indians. Oh no! Poor Sarah died of dysentery. But that’s not the end to my evil ways. It got better. After poor Billy or Sarah bit the dust you are asked to write a dear, sweet epitaph on you fellow wagoneers tombstone...


...And when the game asked, are you sure you want to forge the river? I always replied Yes, I was."

[Big Think]

"Mr. Gessen, 33, boyishly handsome and possessing the self-assurance of a writer twice his age, has never had an easy relationship with literary fame, even as he has gradually amassed it." [NYT]

Diary of a Diorama: Smell This from Book Videos on Vimeo.
[Sloane Crosley]

About the author: Sloane Crosley's debut book of humor essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, is being published this week by Riverhead Books. Her work has appeared in various publications including Playboy, Salon, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and Black Book, where she was a contributing editor. She also wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim in that magazine's history.

I Am Not a Piece of Candy Twisted Symmetrically at the Ends [Esquire]

"Later, while sitting in a coffee shop in the West Village—inexplicably one of the only areas in Manhattan Ms. Crosley can comfortably navigate in spite of the spatial dysphasia disorder from which she has suffered since childhood—she politely said she did not find the question of her universal appeal very interesting." Okay; let's talk about your bizarre disease, then.

Indeed, given that "Ms. Crosley appears actually to enjoy the clusterfuck" of media parties, we have a right to know: What is this spatial dysphasia and, more importantly, is it contagious? Following in the grand tradition of Pasteur and Salk and House, let's proceed first to an exact-match Google search, which reveals that one thing "spatial dysphasia" is not is an accepted medical term. Or any other kind of term for that matter. Leon seems to have sort of made it up, actually!

One might fear that the trail ends here. Happily, though, we find that, in addition to personal essays on her butt and her goldfish, Crosley also recently wrote one, for Salon, about her "severe spatial disability." The scene after a seven-year-old Sloane scored in the tart-cart tranche on her first standardized test:

My mother went on to explain my brush with brilliance, my aptitude for geniusness, my general awesomeness, but the school was having none of it. They made me take an IQ test, after which the test administrator announced he had never seen such a right-left brain discrepancy. I was diagnosed with a severe temporal spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills.

It was official: I was a genius trapped in an idiot's body.

It makes some sense now: "spatial dysphasia" as a phrase of solidarity with "someone else who hid her problems in plain sight...working double-time just to keep up with everyone else's standard of 'normal.'" Now is also when our investigation becomes irretrievably weird, because "recognition dysphasia" is just as non-term a term as the spatial variety. As it turns out, "face blindness" is actually a form of agnosia, which Wikipedia tells us is the "loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective." This might be Crosley's problem with subways and the street grid, but it's definitely not dysphasia.

Truth is, dysphasia is just another word for aphasia, the familiar catch-all term for post–brain damage problems in producing and comprehending language. That's langauge, as in speaking and writing. It is therefore impossible to be a "spatial dysphasic," or a "facial" one. But perhaps Sloane Crosley is in fact an aphasic/dysphasic whose condition prevents her from accurately describing her condition. (Certainly, she appears to have some kind of difficulty communicating normally: "Ms. Crosley...cuts to the chase with editors and writers, and conscientiously tailors her pitches to suit their tastes.") Then again, there's the distinct and unpalatable possibility that Crosley, like so many before her, confused dysphasia with the identical-sounding dysphagia ("difficulty swallowing").

But, let's not work too hard at his; she probably won't be the best person you know in publishing anymore if she ever actually became knowable:

Earlier, an ex-boyfriend had walked by carrying something like four drinks; asked to describe Ms. Crosley, he gave a wistful smile before turning away. "Inscrutable!" he said to no one in particular as he disappeared into the crowd.

The Most Popular Publicist In New York [NYO]