In the late nineteen-nineties, Elise Engler asked an upstairs neighbor a vexing philosophical question: Is a safety pin a thing? Engler is an artist, and she was working on a sequence of drawings called "Everything I Own," and the answer to the safety-pin question would affect the size and the character of the finished work. (She owned a lot of safety pins.) In the end, she and the neighbor, Mark Getlein, the author …
SOURCE: The New Yorker at 10:15AM on June 1, 2015