THE BELIEVER MAY 2004

After a half decade away The Believer has returned home to McSweeney’s. To celebrate the momentous occasion, we’ve dug through our archives and found an extremely limited number of classic and timeless issues for your purchasing pleasure. Once these are gone, they’re gone forever.

Reckless Falsehoods
by Andy Lamey
Elizabeth McCaughey destroyed Clinton’s Health Care Reform Bill. Why is she a celebrity rather than a journalistic pariah?

Close Calls with Nonsense
by Stephen Burt
The reader of modernist poetry wonders: where to go from here? A careful introduction to contemporary poetry reminds us how to read.

v. 4.0
by David Ng
In the quest to streamline language and order, computer programmers face the possibility of becoming the ultimate inefficiency.

“It Was Just Boys Walking”
by Dave Eggers
Sixteen years later, Dominic Arou returns to Marial Bai in the third excerpt from a forthcoming biography of this Sudanese Lost Boy.

Kiki Smith
interviewed by Lynne Tillman
On the important distinction between bestiality and interspecies love, constructing a bridge to the unknown, and paper balloons.

FULL TEXT
Dawit Giorgis
interviewed by Jason Pontin
The former face of the Ethiopian government to the world speaks about famine, unnecessary deaths, and betrayed ideals.

Silvia Benso
interviewed by Jill Stauffer
For this philosopher, ethics is about otherness. So what are the ethical demands of your kitchen spoon?

FULL TEXT
Dr. Leonard’s House Calls
by Kevin Moffett
A meditation on junk mail, commerce, and the human condition: doodads and remedies for sale, no malady too small or too imaginary.

Underway
by Various

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby
This month he Googles Coetzee, questions the usefulness of tautological logic, and gets some good old Dickensian nutrition.

The Uninhabited United States Army
by Joshuah Bearman
Today’s unmanned desert race-bots are tomorrow’s war machines.

Seksopolis
by Milana Vukovi? Runji?

Schema: Filmic Representations of Computer Hacking
by Nick Valvo

THE BELIEVER MAY 2004

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