Contemporary culture is obsessed with makeovers — of bodies, homes, even entire neighborhoods. But this quest for transformative authenticity often has a dark side.
Editor’s Pick
Posted inEditor's Pick
Portrait of the Artist as a Debut Novelist
An essay by Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour (excerpted from Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin) about the challenges of surviving financially in her early years as a writer. Her struggle was compounded by being a writer of color with an unusual name, from a country whose president […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Reading Malcolm X in Texas
When Khirad Siddiqui began wearing a hijab at age 13 as a young woman in Texas seven years ago, she found “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American muslim who too felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
America’s New Opposition
From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the left has been reborn. Can it find a way to harness the populist uprising that brought Trump to power?
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook
Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine reports on Russell Westbrook, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard and the best player in the NBA. What’s extraordinary about this piece isn’t just Anderson’s insight (he wrote about the Thunder for the NYTM in 2012), or how his vivid descriptions of the utter ferocity and skill with which Westbrook plays—it’s that […]
Posted inEditor's Pick, Nonfiction, Quotes
The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook
Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine reports on Russell Westbrook, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard and the best player in the NBA. What’s extraordinary about this piece isn’t just Anderson’s insight (he wrote about the Thunder for the NYTM in 2012), or how his vivid descriptions of the utter ferocity and skill with which Westbrook plays—it’s that Anderson was likely allowed 10 or so minutes to spend actually interviewing Westbrook, a famously taciturn subject. The piece is a marvel of observational reporting.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Little Things
“Why should it be so fulfilling to see the detritus of everyday life made small?” Alice Gregory explores the world of miniatures.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Hi-Tech War on Science Fraud
A team of researchers at Tilburg University’s Meta-Research Center in the Netherlands focuses full time on detecting misconduct and fabricated data in science.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Photographic Chronicle of America’s Working Poor
Writing Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through Maine, Ohio, and California for this piece updating the landmark study of the American working poor, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Off Our Butts: How Smoking Bans Extinguish Solidarity
An impassioned essay on ways anti-smoking legislation is, and always has been, about social control — bans that target and dehumanize the poor in the name of public health.