“Over the next four months, as her classmates fretted over sophomore prom and physics tests, Gu agonised about which superpower to represent in the 2022 Olympics.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Meet the Lobbyist Next Door
What do a Real Housewife, an Olympic athlete, and a doula have in common? They’re all being paid by an ad-tech startup as influencers — peddling not products but ideologies: Like baseball, selling influence is a pastime that rarely gets reinvented. There are only so many ways to get a person to do the thing […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Against Winning
“What I am qualified to say—what I am saying: what links the evils of the modern Olympics to literary criticism, to literary prizes and to A-to-F classroom grades—is that I’m tired of losing and tired of winning, and that we all lose when we focus so often on prizes, grades, and final scores.”
Posted inNewsletter
Loneliness, Power, and the Top 5 of the Week
“Heartbreak makes for a delicious spectacle, from afar.” “I want to be left alone, but I don’t want to be lonely.” Hanif Abdurraqib writes this about a tension that dominated the career of singer Phyllis Hyman—but it also feels like a familiar plea in this dim, early-January week, when many of us leave the chaos of […]
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Jeannette Cooperman, Jackson Arn, Andrew Hui, Myriam Gurba, and Simon Hattenstone.
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re showcasing stories from Mari Cohen, Brenna Ehrlich, Grace Glassman, Tad Friend, and Imogen West-Knights.
Posted inUncategorized
Parks and Re-Creation (and the Week’s Top 5)
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised […]
Posted inUncategorized
A banger of a Christmas story, best of 2023, and more
“I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 […]
Posted inReading List
Suspended Falling: A Reading List on Walking
After seven million years of evolution, walking feels as natural as breathing. But as our environments evolve, so do our ways of walking through them.
