BuzzFeed

Leo Schwartz explores what he learned about nature during a back-breaking summer working on trails in the burned-out Oregon backcountry.

A watch that tells time? How quaint! We don’t need watches any more; we have algorithms now.

After people repeatedly recognize Shannon Keating and her girlfriend from a personal essay she published about a lesbian cruise, and in the midst of the furor over Natalie Beach’s essay about her friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway on The Cut, Keating wonders about the line between writer and influencer, and the ethics of writing about our lives and the people in them.

“A good thing about owning Barbies if you’re a little queer girl is that you can look at their naked bodies and not feel like anyone will say anything weird to you for it.”

It would be a mistake to think the violence against Andy Ngo came out of some vacuum-sealed ideological intolerance toward conservatives. Ngo had been building to a dramatic confrontation with the Portland far left for months, his star rising along with the severity of the encounters.

“I didn’t expect that spending a few days with a couple thousand lesbians on a floating hotel/casino/mall/amusement park would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d been carefully and painstakingly planning for myself.”

The intentions behind the Nazi salute photograph seen around the world were hardly as sinister as they first appeared. But in Trump and Twitter’s America, as one small Midwestern town discovered, image is everything.

“You can design your face for years, paint it like an artist, but in death they’ll mess up your makeup. Wipe off that garish mask with damp cotton balls. Redo my look: Shadow my eyes, gloss my lips, apply some highlights and shimmer. My face will be too thin, the skin stripped of glow; the eyes will look snuffed out. Make it pretty enough to say goodbye to.”

Underneath this rapper’s diet of weed and codeine cough syrup is a teenage boy living out his celebrity fantasy, a boy who is trapped in the space between his public persona and his eighteen-year-old self.

“A social and financial divide is forming — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — that will have ramifications for decades to come.”