This week, our editors recommend notable features and essays by Katie Barnes, Rachel Handler, Alex Hawkins, Lila Shapiro, and Raksha Vasudevan.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Nathan Fielder Is Out of His Mind (and Inside Yours)
On the axis of cringe comedy, Nathan Fielder’s work on TV series Nathan For You ranks somewhere between Sasha Baron Cohen and Covering Your Eyes and Ears to Escape the Vicarious Embarrassment. But Lila Shapiro’s profile, coming just ahead of Fielder’s return to television, attempts to peel back the layers of artifice between man and world. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
In Search of Chad Hugo
For music fans of a certain age (that certain age hopefully being 14 to 94), Chad Hugo is a legendary producer: half of The Neptunes, along with Pharrell Williams. Yet he always played the back — and has receded even more so in recent years. Hugo’s reticence may never fully give way in this profile […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Wings, Sweat, and Tears
While it’s not the first in-depth story about the capsaicin-fueled mayhem of YouTube talk show Hot Ones (see: this 2019 Verge story), Jaya Saxena’s piece goes beyond profile to something more like exegesis. We know that Scoville units introduce a candid new wrinkle to the tired celebrity interview; now, the question becomes what to do […]
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The Greatest Traveler You’ve Never Heard Of
Since 1966, J.R. Harris has traveled the globe 13 times, taking more than 50 trips to many of the world’s bucket list-worthy destinations, including the Andes, the Amazon, Greenland, and more. Now 78, the Black hiker from Queens is arguably one of the world’s most prolific solo explorers, but — as Katherine LaGrave writes in […]
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H-Town United: An Unlikely Soccer Power Rises in Texas
“Coach Vincenzo Cox discovered an untapped vein of global talent at a southwest Houston high school—and mined it to create one of the best boys soccer programs in the country.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Remarkable Brain of a Carpet Cleaner Who Speaks 24 Languages
Vaughn Smith lives in Maryland. He’s 46 years old. He also learns languages with the seeming ease of a run around the block — including endangered indigenous tongues like Salish. In this fascinating profile that’s part ridealong and part science dive, Jessica Contrera takes you inside the life (and brain) of a man with a […]
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‘Where the Bats Hung Out’: How a Basement Hideaway at UC Berkeley Nurtured a Generation of Blind Innovators
For decades, an underground hideaway at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library — better known as “The Cave” — gave rise to a generation of blind leaders, including Joshua Miele, a MacArthur genius grant winner who now builds adaptive technologies at Amazon. The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically — tricks for surviving Berkeley were as […]
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Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All
In an era when too many celebrity profiles either take place entirely over Zoom or vastly misapprehend what makes someone objectively interesting, Gabriella Paiella’s April cover story for GQ manages what seems the impossible: avoiding the pitfalls, commiting without caping, and leaving you with a very real sense of a man you thought you knew […]
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The Scientific Methods of J. Kenji López-Alt
“At 42, López-Alt now has the actual dad status to justify the doofy jokes he inserts into his recipes. When Alicia was born, he left food writing to be a full-time parent. Last year he left pretty much every social media platform except Instagram, where he currently clocks more than 450,000 followers. His career has […]