Tag: nostalgia

Michael Musto argues that wearing rose-colored glasses always leads to an unfair distortion — looking back on the best of the past while comparing it to the worst of the present.

The psychology behind America’s obsession with Hallmark Christmas movies.

At the end of July, no one in Alaska will be able to “Make it a Blockbuster Night!”

On storytelling in the shadow of Chernobyl, U.S. military planes, and not-so-distant German history.

Mabel Rosenheck looks back at a group of friends, and a music festival on the Jersey Shore, that came along when she needed them most.

And sometimes it’s the embodiment of the cages of wealth and privilege we build around ourselves.

One person searches for the anonymous fruit flavor of the pediatric amoxicillin that so many of us, somehow, came to love.

The cult show returned this week. Here, three writers reflect on David Lynch’s effect on their lives.

When minimalism goes down-market, where do the tchotchkes go?

Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.

Why can’t we let go of Mermaids-era Winona Ryder? Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt explores the last great pre-internet icon.

Six stories that examine the complicated heritage of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]

Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal. *** Many people interviewed said they dreamed […]

To understand why Urban Outfitters and American Apparel have declined so spectacularly, it’s helpful to remember what it was that made them so successful in the first place. In their heyday, each made a science of identifying exactly what it was that made hipsters so attractive, then recreated that aesthetic in their stores.

As soon as we’re finished, Thad shuffles to the garage to grab two 150-or-so-gallon black garbage bags. We stuff all of the presents inside, double-knot the bags at the top, and drag them to the front door, confident that the next morning, not one of our kids — not even the nine-year-old — will wonder […]

Why do some people look back and others refuse to? What are the pleasures of  “nostalgia”? The word itself has its etymology in the Greek nostos(homecoming) + algia (pain), but the condition is more multifaceted, combined of equal parts of homesickness, self-indulgence, sentimentality, and an alertness to the genuine, confected, or nonexistent pleasures of other times, other ages, […]

If you missed knowing me when I was 26, Throwback Thursday gives you the chance to see me in my physical prime, which I know is very important to you, particularly those 3,426 Facebook Friends who did not know me then. Or now, actually. What, another Throwback Thursday already? O.K., here is a picture of […]