This year has been emotionally costly; can we reinvest?
To begin with, let me say I have been lucky, lucky, lucky during the pandemic. I’ve been able to work with almost no disruption. I’ve been healthy, and my family has been healthy. Now we’re vaccinated. Most of the people we know have made it through this year in pretty good shape, which is, of course, a miracle not enjoyed by lots of other people. So relatively speaking, we are very fortunate.
That said, this year has sucked. I’m only beginning to realize some of the ways it has sucked, now that things are loosening ever so slightly. Last week…
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Ascetic Athleisure, Extravagant Couture, or Curated Classic Tailoring?
As we look forward to emerging from over a year of forced hibernation, the fashion conscious and the fashion averse alike speculate about what we will wear once we get out and about. As one would expect in our troubled and polarized nation, two opposing camps have emerged, which I will style as the ascetics and the aesthetes.
The ascetics maintain that a year of virtuous isolation and productive remote work on Zoom will cure us, once and for all, of our vanity and our unhealthy addiction to wasteful and frivolous fashion. Society will embrace the simple virtues of practical…
Can a century-old colonial crisis be solved before a once-in-a-generation opportunity passes the island by?
Gabriela Medina was around 10 years old when she first learned in school that the United States’ president was her president, too. The Congress she’d heard about? The one that met thousands of miles away across the ocean? Well, they made laws that applied to her as well, laws that often superseded the ones enacted by leaders at home in Puerto Rico.
But what really stuck with Gabriela was something so fundamentally unfair, so mind-blowingly unjust, it began shaping her political identity. As a Puerto Rican living in the archipelago, she would never be able to choose who represented her…
An appreciation of how wonderfully, revolutionarily boring Joe Biden has been as president
What’s President Joe Biden’s position on the legal travails of Representative Matt Gaetz? Where does he stand on the removal of some Dr. Seuss books from publication? What public comments did he make about the Japanese golfer who won the Masters last weekend? What does President Joe Biden think about NFTs? After copious research, I believe the answers to those questions are none, he doesn’t, he didn’t, and he almost definitely has no idea what that is.
I keep trying to articulate just what we are currently experiencing as a country, and I think I’ve found a good comparison. Do…
We’ve all been engaging in a global CO2 emissions experiment. It doesn’t have to end
Are we done with being at home?
We’ve explored every cranny and mended every drape in our houses and apartments. And now with a few more degrees of warmth in the air and the rising possibility of a shot or two in our arms, many of us are thinking about the open road.
But before your finger actually hits the buy button on that online reservation, it might be worth taking a pause and considering what staying home has done for the planet. In spite of all of its miseries 2020 was the year our country finally went on a…
Active Voice
The full-time Harvard student, founder, and published author had to learn things the hard way while working to uproot the taboos around women discussing their periods
Nadya Okamoto has no problem talking about her period. Growing up in a household with a single mom and two sisters kept the floor open for all things menstruation. At age 16, during morning commutes to school, she would chat with homeless women who first introduced her to period poverty, a global issue affecting women and girls who don’t have access to sanitary products.
After researching the crisis more, Okamoto realized she had yet to hear about the issue because of the stigma surrounding menstrual cycles. It’s not widely known that 40 U.S. states tax tampon sales. Recognizing her privilege…
The unexpected joy of difficult, problematic movies
Don’t judge me, but I collect VHS. I swear I’m not a hipster. I’m a first-year millennial, and VHS tapes truly are the sacred texts of my people. The holy, acrid smell of seemingly ageless plastic as the cassette slides from its box. The ritual before inserting it into the VCR: Hinge the flap, spool the tape taut with your fingertips, and check the rewind status. Perhaps denominational differences in household pre-watch observances: popcorn and a Coke, read the back of the box, pillow fort.
The nostalgic benefits of VHS extend to content as well. Original trailers, title cards, and…
Keep your travelgrams to yourself
Nope! It’s just too soon. Pardon the overt social shame, but if you’re posting happy, bubbly, #blessed travel photos to Facebook, Insta and the rest of social, you can be sure that everyone scrolling on the other end is either rolling their eyes or searching for the “unfollow” button. Or “snooze.” Or “Jesus Christ, go away.” We get it. You just want to go back to normal. We all do. But, in the name of common purpose — and pure human decency — please stop. No one (zero people, total) wants to see you in a t-shirt and Ray-Bans rejoicing…
People who identify as ‘nones,’ or nonreligious, are one of the fastest-growing groups in America
Deirdre Sugiuchi was five when her dad became a born-again Christian. She grew up bouncing between Mississippi churches: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian Church in America. (“The hardcore version,” she says.) They attended twice a day on Sundays, each Wednesday, plus any revival. She went to school at segregation academies, and had to fight with her father to be allowed to wear pants.
Sugiuchi attended a Focus on the Family-associated church camp where she was taught how to write letters to influence members of Congress. She describes her father’s version of discipline, corporal punishment during which he’d quote scripture — spare the…
The ratings are down for political programming. Good.
It has been a difficult few years for the media industry, with newspapers being raided by vulture capitalists, once-great websites being gutted by private equity firms and the President of the United States referring to journalists as “enemies of the people,” rhetoric that inevitably led to disturbed people trying to kill them. The news media is the least trusted institution in the United States (other than Congress, of course), which is a bad sign when your entire reason for being is to inform, and to be trusted by, the public. It’s a rough time all around.
But one thing that…
