Has Life Ceased to Be Fun?
Craving fun is a miserable experience; you feel boring and old and bogged down. But realizing what I am craving and why—that is already helping.
By Jeannette Cooperman
The Difference Between Incels and Femcels
And now there are femcels, with their own online community and a symmetrical loathing of the men who do not want them.Would it be better to return to the stigma of “spinsters” and “old maids”? Hardly.
On the Vagina, Whose Ownership Is Currently in Question
Basic sex-ed should have straightened us out, but instead it took writers and artists to scrub off the shame. Half a century ago, Judy Chicago threw her now-legendary dinner party in honor of thirty-nine strong, famous women, designing porcelain plates with vulva and butterfly forms for the installation.
Writing About Nature While We Still Can
taking notice matters, these days. Maybe that is why nature writers often try too hard: they see the species dying away, the ground burning, and know they need to write about it—but there is no time left to fall in love with the facts, as the leisurely Victorians did.
Drunk as a Monkey
Darwin himself suggested that most monkeys would drink alcohol if it were available; he even knew a pub owner who regularly got his pet monkeys drunk. German biologist Alfred Brehm announced that African baboons could be lured by strong beer.
The Clockwork Orgasm
Any minute now, all this technology will be mass-produced and affordable, transforming what are now sex dolls with AI heads atop their silicone bodies into the sex robots of science fiction, so sophisticated they are easy to mistake for a human. And then? Will men still bother with real women? Or will they prefer a projected fantasy to a more demanding reality?
Enlightened, Disenchanted, Disgusted
“Disenchantment” peaked in the early 1970s (Watergate, Vietnam), and now the word pops up everywhere you look.
Unsafe at Any Speed
We still speed. The most frequently broken law in the United States is the numeric speed limit. But now we speed because we are late or angry; there is seldom any joy in it. Nor is it safe: the roads are too crowded to allow safe reaction time and maneuvering.
Gaming Your Life
Companies saw our foreshortened attention spans and went casino on us. Simple transactions now tease and puzzle and lure us, and bells ring and lights flash if we walk far enough or slide enough merch into our cart.
We Are Never the Same After—What?
Often, the traumas we fear will scar us do not. Severe pain, major surgery, getting fired or broken up with, wrecking the car, losing one’s faith, embarrassing oneself…the angst fades, and while we can recount the details and even laugh about some of them, the sting…
Matrix, in the Middle Ages
Lauren Groff was nervous about writing a novel set two thousand and ten years ago. This, I get. Even the prospect of writing a book set before smartphones feels daunting: so many details to reconstruct, an entire lifeworld that functioned in a radically different way. Lovely…
Material Us, Living in a Digital World
Humans are analog, Hassan suggests. We were formed by the technology we created, the tools we drew from nature in order to extend our bodies and our brains. For millennia, we have connected to, and found meaning in, a material world.