With King Lear, We Are God’s Spies
Lear is too big to be contained—but so are greed, power, and despair. This production is not a cheesy attempt to “make relevant” by dreaming up cool costumes and picking a fun place and time.
By Jeannette Cooperman
The New Fluidity
A new name or new spelling, new avatar, new sexual orientation, new status, filtered photo—the self is a work in process. The most we did was try on crazy outfits, sweating in tiny dressing rooms and tossing stuff over the walls to each other. These kids try on whole identities.
Rejected by an Algorithm
Are we at the mercy of our machines, then? This is the crux, the reason I could not swat away this buzzing frustration. It feels helpless in a way that is bigger than the issue at hand.
How Teenage Girls Dress and Why We Care
Extricating the female body from sexual desire altogether would be a societal wardrobe solution—but I doubt that is what anybody wants, even if it were possible.
What It Is Like to Be a Sex Worker
There is a reason we use the word “intimate.” Sex cuts closer to our core than any other physical act. It can rip away the garb and the façade, break through the boundaries, ease loneliness, soothe anxiety, restore a sense of self.
Quick—Pick Yourself Some Pseudonyms
We follow an identity, a persona, for what it brings us in digital form. We change our own identities, too, adopting a handle or username that no one will connect to the dork paying taxes on a ranch house in Poughkeepsie.
Strange Words for a Strange Time
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade.
How Grief’s Alchemy Turned “Hamnet” into “Hamlet”
O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge.
Is Beauty a Grace or a Curse?
Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster.
He Turned Birds into Pantone Colors
Ridgway devoted his life to creatures that soared and glided, trotting after them through mud and storms, ever vigilant, and detailing and comparing and never giving up. No one has described as many North American bird species, let alone illustrated them himself.
Why Superman Used a Phone Booth
The booth represents a refusal to fling away old technology—and the memories it triggered. Curious whether the phone booth ever made the local news, I check the Republic-Times archives and learn that this phone booth is new.
Money Is a Popularity Contest
Digital originals and currencies could give us a world that is more flexible, uncensored, and democratic. But they will also give us a world in which the very currency by which we live changes value by the minute and nothing can stop it from collapsing.