This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on […]
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‘Every Means of Confession Creates a Kind of Person Who Confesses’
Every means of confession creates a kind of person who confesses. You become who you are by saying what you did. The details make a difference. That pronoun, “I,” feels one way when you say it as part of a formula, in the dusk of a confessional, to a priest you cannot see behind the […]
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Why Warren Buffett Funds Birth Control Research
Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said […]
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The Company That Controls Elite Cheerleading
Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no […]
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The ‘Stunt’ That Helped Pass a Barrier-Breaking Law
In 1990, a group of activists and legislators fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gathered on the steps of the Capitol to make a statement. Writing for Curbed about the act’s 1990 passage and its impacts over the last quarter century, Patrick Sisson details how the group dramatized the difficulties faced […]
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Pseudonyms, Sources, and Jon Krakauer’s ‘Missoula’
Only one of the rape victims in Krakauer’s book, “Cecilia Washburn,” is identified with a pseudonym. “And I didn’t interview her,” Krakauer said. (Krakauer says he discussed the possibility of an interview with Washburn’s attorney multiple times, but she replied each time that her client likely would not consent to an interview.) The rest of […]
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The Power of Reddit as a Public Health Advocacy Tool
Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of […]
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Cashing In On Tech’s Spiritual Awakening
Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that many tech workers in San Francisco turn to psychics for a glimpse of the future. Or that psychics, in turn, are rebranding themselves as spiritual therapists, executive coaches, and corporate counselors. The trend is common enough to be spoofed on HBO’s Silicon Valley, where the show’s fictional tech CEO confers […]
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Obama’s Typographic Legacy
The relative distinctiveness of campaign logos is a recent development: There was a time when they all looked basically the same, give or take a star, often featuring the same stylized, waving flag. The 1990s and early 2000s were a different time, with less media noise and fewer shiny objects vying for voters’ attention, so there […]
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The Democratic Fame of Silent Movie Stars
The period known as “Classic Hollywood” began in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with the gradual consolidation of the studios, and ends at a nebulous point in the 1950s. In the earliest days of the so-called “movie colony,” you could get a job in the moving pictures if you a) had a great face (Clara Bow); […]