In her book "The Helpers," Kathy Gilsinan has asked questions most reporters do not think to bother with, gathering up tiny details and using the most telling to bring these people to life. You feel you know them, not just casually but the way you know longtime coworkers or neighbors.
Everybody and everything around us are hurtling through time together, so we often experience a relative stillness as we age, just as we stretch and yawn hurtling through space at 872,000 miles per hour. If you ever wondered why Great Uncle Gus fails to register the…
Graffiti is about breaking rules. It ignores convention, shuns commerce. Once Ruggeri had lived long enough, gathered enough perspective from travel and textbooks, and running a bar where souls spilled, he figured out how to channel that energy, and he rediscovered freedom. With raw exhilaration, graffiti unlocked his art.
How did we decide to segregate restrooms in the first place? Some say the segregation began in the rigidly gendered Victorian era, and before the Industrial Revolution, toilets were often communal and mixed. Others point to ancient art that shows the sexes carefully segregated.
Much of this jewelry tilts toward gender fluidity, toward androgyny. Younger men seem happy to wear it, eager to insist that it does not threaten their masculinity or that they have moved beyond traditional masculinity anyway. Yet every report on men’s jewelry is accompanied by a sidebar or guide to staying manly.
Jean-Marc Côté, circa 1900, from series ‘En L’An 2000,’ courtesy Françoise Foliot, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Technological innovation is tricky. Flying cars, sure, we know what to do: get a car, add wings and a propeller. But put a magnetron in a metal box and use it to hyper-excite…
Designed as a forum for psychologists, "Quillette" soon became, as "Politico" put it, “the unofficial digest” of the “intellectual dark web.” The phrase added a thrill to my spy chase.
"Inventing Anna" was a Netflix triumph, scooping up 77.3 million hours of viewers’ time the week after its release. Critics were lukewarm, but the show was crack. And I am still trying to figure out why.
Self-regulation starts to look trivial, even pathetic, when most of your life’s shape is already colored in by circumstances that lie outside your control, and the surrounding society has already left you behind.
Screenshot from ‘Oleg’s Choice,’ Java Films Oleg’s Choice: A Personal Look at the Conflict in Ukraine (Java Films, 2016) is an insightful profile of two young Russian men, Oleg and Max, who volunteered to fight without pay in the Donbas after conflict erupted there in 2014. It…