I was thinking about ghosts recently, after watching Presence by Steven Soderbergh and I ran into an administrative issue: Why are they wearing clothes? Not why are they wearing white. Not even why do they sometimes drag chains around, which I mean just seems inconvenient when your main activity involves walking through walls. I mean clothes at all. If I die tonight and my soul leaves my body, I can just about follow the proposed mechanics. Body here. Soul elsewhere. Fine. Bu

On a February afternoon in 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem was shovelling snow into an open manhole on 123rd Street when something in the dark started thrashing. They looked down. An alligator looked back up. It took a rope, a noose, and a fair amount of yelling before Salvatore Condulucci and his friends dragged a seven-and-a-half-foot reptile out onto the street, where it promptly died, most likely from the cold, or the fall, or both. The New York Times ran the st