The Hidden History of the Laundry Chute
Dead bodies, thieves, skulls, and historical bits of ephemera that fly out of pockets on the passage down are just some of the hidden secrets that laundry chutes reveal.
Fifty Shades Darker: A Spoilereview
A blow-by-blow recounting of an awful, retrograde sequel.
Eating Toward Immortality
For nutritionist and intuitive eating advocate Michelle Allison, diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.
How to Build an Autocracy
The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.
America’s Great Divergence
A growing earnings gap between those with a college education and those without is creating economic and cultural rifts throughout the country.
The Hermit Who Inadvertently Shaped Climate-Change Science
Billy Barr moved into a remote part of the Rocky Mountains in search of solitude over 40 years ago. To avoid boredom, he documented snow levels, animal sightings, and the date flowers first bloomed. “…collectively his work has become some of the most significant indication that climate change is rearranging mountain ecosystems more dramatically and quickly than anyone imagined.”
In Defense of Facts
The essay is a flexible, accommodating form of writing based in fact. Writer William Deresiewicz takes writer John D’Agata to task for what he believes is D’Agata’s misleading account of the essay’s history, its form and its modern incarnation, and he skillfully dismantles the vague but inaccurate concept of the essay that D’Agata’s three large essay anthologies promote. This is no literary feud. In times like ours, where the media and science are under attack, the President-elect lies without concern for fact-checking, and many Americans discount truth itself, this debate concerns those of us outside academia.
Beyoncé’s Year of Peace and Misunderstanding
An analysis of the ways in which Beyonce’s “Formation” and “Lemonade” bore reflections of America’s divisions, and of the polarized views of those works held by people and politicians on the right.
The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America
A response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black” from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: “My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.”
My President Was Black
A history of the first African American White House, as Coates examines Obama’s successes and failures — and what came next.