The Good Girl's Guide To Staying Alive
When it comes to true crime, women are often both victim and audience. Why are female readers drawn to tales of their own destruction?
View ArticleFinishing Video Games As Fast As Possible, For Fun And Profit
Talking to a member of the video game speedrunning community about the appeal of the practice, its status as a sort of performance art, and tensions over encroaching commercialization.
View ArticleLosing Your Faith — At Divinity School
My loss of God occurred soon after I got to divinity school. I still can’t decide if that was the least likely of places for it to happen or the only place in the world where it was possible.
View ArticleThe Drag Queen Behind Ursula
This is the story of how Glenn Milstead, a big-haired, poo-eating Charm City drag queen named Divine, came to inspire a Disney villainess.
View ArticleWinona, Forever
Winona Ryder has always been trapped in her own anticipatory nostalgia, and the public has always wanted to keep her there.
View ArticleThe Gentle Art Of Pretending To Understand What's Going On
Listening to a man you find funny laugh at jokes you don’t get is, in retrospect, a master class in learning to read social cues.
View ArticleThe Dark Science Of The Stars
We’re more likely to stare at the light in our hands than the light above. What do we lose when we lose the sky? Even if we could fix the obstruction of artificial light overnight, most people,...
View ArticleHere's To Another Year Of Being Doomed To Be Ourselves
Human beings are not typically built for the titanic amounts of vicious self-hatred it takes to become genuinely good people, by which I mean people who look in the mirror and see neither a formless...
View ArticleThe First Time I Painted A Painting
I’ll need to forge it, of course. The way these things work is, you have to first figure out a known artist whose work your painting resembles enough that you can hock it as an imitation, or a...
View ArticleKeeping Feminist Film Criticism Subversive
Feminist film writing has historically struggled with a problem of reach limited by privilege. Now it can (and does) enter mainstream conversations with a click or share. But can online journals keep...
View Article'Like' This So I Know I'm Real
Despite the recent changes at Facebook, the “like” has very little to do with the actual emotional content of a response. It’s a simple nod in your direction. But it also serves as the ultimate...
View ArticleBoston Rules Once Again
Ever since Gus Van Sant’s "Good Will Hunting" introduced 1997 audiences to a beautiful but violent and appealingly damaged young man — stuck doing construction in Southie, wrestling with undiscovered...
View ArticleCan Science Fiction And Fantasy Coexist?
Readers who embrace futuristic narratives about artificial intelligences or evolved dolphins may balk at those about magicians or goblins, but creators are increasingly bridging the genre gap.
View ArticleA Journey To The Medical Netherworld
If your child gets sick, hope for something mechanical. Failing that, wish for something commonplace. This is a mother’s quest to find her daughter a diagnosis.
View ArticleWhen Is It Okay To Laugh At The Dead?
Nancy Reagan, Antonin Scalia, Glenn Frey: Are all celebrity deaths equal and equally hilarious?
View ArticleSucking The Fun Out Of Fellatio
An act that rarely involves blowing and only occasional labor, “blow job” sounds like something created by a thirsty Marxist, a guy as alienated from his own pleasure as he is from his work.
View ArticleThe Kid Who Wrote The Bestseller
Gordon Korman wrote his first bestseller in seventh grade. Eighty-eight books (and counting) later, a movie adaptation revisits the early work of a man whose audience changes every graduation season.
View ArticleThe Cat Psychic
I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my pet anymore. And then a friend gave me a phone number.
View ArticleA Diamond And A Kiss: The Women Of John Hughes
There was a reason none of the teens in the legendary director’s films were real rebels, but rather outsiders with an eye on upward mobility.
View ArticleHunger Makes Me
A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite — for food, for sex, for simple attention — is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.
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