Walter White Supremacy
...Breaking Bad so sparingly depicts. When we do see White's ultimate customers, they're zombies: all scabs and eroded teeth. We're not talking about impulse buyers or comparison shoppers here; it's...
Precarious Verse
...place, achieving in the execution uncommon complexity and richness. Poetic effect rests on defamiliarization, although not necessarily as a preliminary to alienation but to its overcoming. Just as the speaker...
Steal This Article
...property, make them pay for it. Yeah, scan a few items—but don’t scan a few more. Nonchalantly pass your items a bit too high over the scanner and into your...
Grooming Style
A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity
Dear Marooned Alien Princess
...Our advice columnist Zahira Kelly specializes in the jolt of recognition that comes from rearranging or inverting mainstream hierarchies. In this month’s column, she dissects the costs of online...
Desiring Machines
...year. Its images, videos, and quotes were summarily collected, attributed, and uploaded with little by way of commentary. Drones, mapping, mirror worlds, machine vision, surveillance infrastructure, conspicuous augmentation, pixelation, fetishizing...
Unsolicited Advice for Living in the End Times, Vol 16
...asking Mr. Gorbachev to put back that wall. They could at least have taken it down slower or even tried dressing it up a bit: Hang some art, give it...
A Sentimental Education
...Poet, essayist, translator, activist — Russian writer Kirill Medvedev has worn and taken off many hats While many things about present day Russia might seem still a bit Soviet,...
The Risks of Overreporting
...the real thing, and those gel trays are repulsive.) When we overreport—or overread reports—of beauty work that crosses the line, we nudge ourselves just a little bit closer to that...
Managing Hearts with Kim and Flo
...periods of waiting. They emphasize action, reflexes, decision-making, and efficiency. Diner Dash and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood games fill their screens completely, demanding their players’ full attention. Time management games require...
Paranoia lost
...(sometimes laundered as "sharing" and "tolerance"), more subsumption of everyday life by social media. It's a bit like how the internalization of cool into the fashion business means that nothing...
Anger Management
...value beyond this doesn’t exist, clear and simple, it’s the only value that exists. Which is why…I don’t understand how it could have occurred to you to come to this...
Jennifer's Body, Redux: The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Actresses
...of me has to agree. But I think that’s also a bit of a red herring, and here’s why: Talented actresses are asked all the time to manipulate their bodies...
The Dating Game: Compliments, Part III
...whether or not merging is actually your goal in a relationship, the whole "the two will become one flesh" bit is pretty much the basis of marriage in the western...
Love Bites
...two, and even three, hours in the chair." "Caries of the teeth is unusually common among the insane," observes Theodore H. Kellogg in A Text-Book on Mental Diseases (1897), "and...
Don't Stop Beliebing
...split is absolutely there in the pop avatars themselves. Bieber, effectively commanding an army of the most technologically advanced tweens in human history, sings “I will never say never/ I...