Medium

In this incisive reported essay written as part of Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies series, Chelsea G. Summers mines her own fears, writing about the skin as a battleground for many women terrified by aging’s effect on their birthday suit.

At Medium, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body author Roxane Gay created this excellent pop-up magazine, to be delivered in installments over four Tuesdays in April — “a month-long magazine exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies,” she writes. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human.” She tapped 24 writers to contribute. This first edition features an introduction by Gay, and essays by Randa Jarrar, Kiese Laymon, Matthew Salesses, Keah Brown, S. Bear Bergman, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. To come in the next three editions: Carmen Maria Machado, chelsea g. summers, Kaveh Akbar, Terese Mailhot, Casey Hannan, Samantha Irby, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Kelly Davio, Brian Oliu, Mike Copperman, Danielle Evans, Jennine Capó Crucet, Megan Carpentier, Kima Jones, the writer known as Your Fat Friend, Gabrielle Bellot, Mensah Demary, and larissa pham.  

During the last quarter of the 20th century, William Jellett danced at countless rock shows in the UK. From Black Sabbath to the Sex Pistols to Queen, he was there, holding cryptic signs and rattling a tambourine. You can see his skinny shirtless frame in countless photos and live footage. So who was he, and where did he go?

Sam Lansky writes about dating and his conflicted feelings about love and relationships.

“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale.” James Bridle traces a profoundly disturbing digital trail through “industrialized nightmare production,” flagging a long tail of iterative violence that human oversight is powerless to contain.

After The Beach Boys’ domestic album sales started suffering in the late 1960s and their squeaky clean surfer image fell out of favor, they co-wrote a song that helped them connect with America’s shaggy, drug-taking counterculture and regain their popularity. This is the story of that song, and the story of American pop music after the Summer of Love.

Kim France—founding editor of Lucky magazine, and one-time writer for Sassy—on feeling like an outsider among fancier editors at Conde Nast, and dreading the annual company luncheon at The Four Seasons, especially when seated next to chairman Si Newhouse.

Former Lucky Magazine editor and Girls of a Certain Age blogger Kim France reflects on the miscalculation that her life would be perfect, and her marriage would work, if she lived in the perfect Brooklyn Brownstone.

Writer and performer Sara Benincasa writes a brilliant, biting, and hilarious response to the guy who wrote her asking, “Why did you gain so much weight?”

“When I was a child, I always half-suspected that America wasn’t real.” Laurie Penny goes back stage at both conventions, and sees American myth-making in action.