The Lie I Tell Myself Daily
It is the most underrated virtue in this culture....
Society & Culture
Dig Out Your Crystal Ball
My friend is a little witchy, a little woowoo. She gets “feelings” before something happens.... Does precognition exist?
The “Six-seven!” Phenomenon Taunts Slang to Make Sense
Slang is those half-hidden words, code intended only for certain circles, or what our parents used to call “the in-crowd.” “Six-seven!” seems unique in that it has nothing to hide. Past slang involving numbers—the one-to-ten scale of physical attractiveness, the “Five-0” reference to police, the “4:20” signifier for a daily dose of cannabis—all had immediate or even urgent significance. “Six-seven,” by contrast, just sits in its own hollow existence.
Are Flash Mobs Over or Just Ruined?
I fall for these every time. Did we really have to commodify spontaneous joy?
Of Living Alone
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.
The Rich Ambiguity of “Antifa Founder’s Girlfriend”
It seems fitting that this unnamed woman has so far proved—at least until Noem and her team choose to reveal more—as shadowy as the group she is alleged to have allied with, or was at least sympathetic to.
The Psychological Beatitudes
Stop prioritizing.
The Unmoving Grasshopper and the Oddball Friends Who Say “I Love You”
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
The Full Court Press of the Black Athlete
As commonly portrayed, pro basketball in the 1970s suffered from Black athletes who lacked not only the dignity of 1960s pioneers such as Bill Russell or Elgin Baylor, but also the mass-marketability of 1980s icons such as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. The popular memory of pro hoops in this era includes accounts of contract-jumping, on-court fighting, and cocaine-sniffing. Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball seeks to dislodge this conventional narrative.
The Reinterpretation of the American Dream
However you interpreted the American dream, it was all that held us together.