Vaughn Smith lives in Maryland. He’s 46 years old. He also learns languages with the seeming ease of a run around the block — including endangered indigenous tongues like Salish. In this fascinating profile that’s part ridealong and part science dive, Jessica Contrera takes you inside the life (and brain) of a man with a […]
Peter Rubin
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My Friend Goo
When the pandemic upended her daily life, Deb Olin Unferth started walking, and one day met a goose. A measured, tender tale of loss and love and difficult friendship — one that warns you throughout that a sting is coming, but manages to sneak up and wallop you anyway. He was feisty, the town bully, […]
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The Editor Who Moves Theory Into the Mainstream
Among a certain breed of academic (and academia-adjacent) reader, Duke University Press holds an unswayable cachet. And in this tight, arch profile of Duke UP editor Ken Wissokur, Jennifer Wilson does the magazine version of what Wissokur does with his authors and their scholarly books: take something that sounds dreadfully dry, and make it perfectly […]
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The Boy From Booker T.
Twelve years ago, journalism student Jeffrey McWhorter structured his senior project around a group of boys in East Austin’s Booker T. Washington Terraces. He photographed them, interviewed them and their families, got to know them all. While those relationships began under the auspices of reportage, they lasted as a very real friendship, even after one […]
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Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All
In an era when too many celebrity profiles either take place entirely over Zoom or vastly misapprehend what makes someone objectively interesting, Gabriella Paiella’s April cover story for GQ manages what seems the impossible: avoiding the pitfalls, commiting without caping, and leaving you with a very real sense of a man you thought you knew […]
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We’ve Underestimated Sprinkles
I love sprinkles. Always have. And somehow, as Cathy Erway shows in this delightful piece for Taste, the world has caught up to my juvenile palate. Thankfully, she phrases the appeal more artfully: “the nutritionless, mostly flavorless, tiny doodads that mimic absolutely nothing found in nature provide outsize comfort with egalitarian underpinnings. And they aren’t […]
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What Lies Beneath Hip-Hop’s Swagger
Over the weekend, The New York Times Magazine published a twist on its annual “Songs That Matter” package: “Songs That Got Us Through It.” The newest is overall a remarkable project, stuffed with keen criticism. But Smith’s piece, which feels for the pulse of aggression in today’s and yesterday’s hip-hop, stands out — as bracing […]
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Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
The weirder things get in the world, the easier it is to believe that what we know as reality is in fact happening within the confines of some sort of program. Physicists, despite their love of ideas like quantum entanglement, tend not to agree. But in this shaggy, personable essay, Jason Kehe — under the […]
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Does My Son Know You?
Ringer writer Jonathan Tjarks veers from his usual NBA beat to unpack his cancer diagnosis and the shadow it casts over his experience as a son and a father. Unblinking and plainspoken, he somehow manages to strip the emotion out of his writing — but not the emotional impact. I was 12. That’s the age […]
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The Scientific Methods of J. Kenji López-Alt
“At 42, López-Alt now has the actual dad status to justify the doofy jokes he inserts into his recipes. When Alicia was born, he left food writing to be a full-time parent. Last year he left pretty much every social media platform except Instagram, where he currently clocks more than 450,000 followers. His career has […]