The Selfless Man
...see him embody our slogans emerges as much from empathy and communal understanding as it does from reverence. There is a little bit of Jacob in all of us. It...
Warcare Industries
K-beauty’s explosive popularity is wartime beauty recalibrating for an era of endless war, where civilians can best aid the war effort by behaving as though there isn’t one
Beautiful Weapons
...mechanical zones followed by scavenging a hideous trashscape for spare parts to repair my broken Hitachi and cum my brains out. I’ve made a game about communicating nonverbally with alien...
Short Circuit
...(via Boston, Chicago, and Memphis) a bit over a decade ago, but Weintraub’s cinema is an altogether more sophisticated thing visually, playing on The New Talkies tired theme of youthful...
Requiem for My Potential Hotness [Guest Post]
...my crush’s girlfriend wore. I compulsively plucked my eyebrows until they were gone. But like the slim person who looks back at old photos and thinks, I can’t believe I...
Beyond Avant-Garde
...bother to look at. And some commentators might be inclined to regard early adopters of social-media apps as avant-garde consumers, seizing on new possibilities for gratification, evasion, and status distinction....
Namaste Inc.
...of Indian identity. To the support center’s customers, authenticity is, well, a bit too Indian. Yet too Indian is how many Indians themselves may come to feel in certain circumstances....
The Other Foot
...parents. Apparently they come from money. Lots and lots of money. It doesn’t give kids a good message, you know? Who can afford a pair of designer shoes when you’re...
"A sort of post-colonial studies joke": Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation
...a little bit superfluous? If my primary reference point for The Stranger is already the critique that is sometimes made of this Algerian-born French writer—the “perverse arrogance” that Achebe once...
Sunday Reading
...been closed." "The next morning my aunt called a doctor. A bit pointless, I thought, I will kill myself soon." "Putting on an awkward rhinoceros horn is more comfortable than...
Unsolicited Advice for Living in the End Times, Vol. 21
...It doesn’t always help to be intelligible I have a dream of all people living out the end times squeezing every little bit of joy out of every...
Dans le Rouge
...Some students are beginning to reason, quite understandably, that if they're going to be arrested anyway, they may as well be a bit more ambitious. It’s just as easy, after...
Health Equity Capture
How the weight-loss industry Uses Black celebrity in the Ozempic era
Mind Games Forever
...all programming, are composed of series of “transactions,” in which participants inhabit one of three “ego states,” Child, Parent, or Adult (corresponding to Freud’s id, superego, and ego). Transactional analysis...
An Apology for the Institutionalized Death
...perhaps for symbols of commonplace joy (sunlight, ice cream); sample from the wealth of data that supports all the good sense that hospice makes; and finally paint a solemn and...
The Albatross Around Johnny Depp's Brain
...from a long tradition of Orientalizing portraits of American native peoples, starting in the 18th century and earlier. And I suspect that Sherman Alexie's "Crow Testament" has a bit more...