Strip clubs, board games, sugar babies, an office coup — and a whole lot of money

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, […]

This week is all about spelling. Some attempts to reform it have succeeded. (You've probably noticed that words are spelled differently in the US than in British English.) Others have failed hilariously. (You'll see.) But we're burying the lede; our first topic is that word itself: 'lede.' How did it find its current form? Then, we'll discuss the godfather of American English himself, Noah Webster. (Yes, that's where we got half our name.)

In Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald argues that today’s popular music, movies, TV shows, and books are making the world a better place. For all the hand-wringing about the decline of morals and the cheapening of culture in our time, contemporary media brims with examples of fascinating and innovative art that promote positive and uplifting moral messages—without coming across as “preachy.”

Given The Intercept's vehement denials, readers are entitled to see for themselves what the truth is: transparency journalism with integrity requires.

The two-year charade that upended people’s lives

My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance.

Moments of social mobilization enliven and expand our political imagination. Among the things that sorely need reimagining is our technology.

Sarah Jeong talks to Newton about the details of his deal, subscription journalism, and what makes email such a good media format

This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.

This is the third installment of a multi-part series designed to help you familiarize yourself with the tools used to make visual, data-driven essays.

It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.

The global pandemic is accelerating the collapse of independent music journalism.

The telegram was a breakthrough in communication technology, which Vannevar Bush imagined could evolve in unprecedented ways.

More than any other tech company, Twitter was invented by its users. That’s no slight against the engineers and designers who actually built the thing. It’s just to say that what we think of as...

In the late 2000s I was sleeping with all of my friends. This didn’t make me special; we were young in one of the several ways people move to cities like New York in order to be young. We were in general not doing much with our lives and so we did what generation after generation of young people have done in order to combat that particular circumstance: We tried to generate enough sex drama amongst ourselves that we didn’t have to notice that we weren’t doing much of anything, that things were harder than they were promised to be, that we had very little money and that everyone else seemed ...

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

The joy of the free-diver, the peace of the loon, the patience of the turtle, and a touch of the ingenuity and panache of the great sea explorers (a Jacques Cousteau or a Captain Nemo). Tending my depths, plunging into seas uncharted, dipping into mysterious pools and emerging to share the treasures and tales I find there (and perhaps hiding a few treasure maps of my own).

There is a moment in "Shrek" when the despicable Lord Farquaad has the Gingerbread Man tortured by dipping him into milk. This prepares us for another moment when Princess Fiona's singing voice is so piercing it causes jolly little bluebirds to explode; making the best of a bad situation, she fries their eggs. This is not your average family cartoon. "Shrek" is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

In our November cover story, Taylor Swift talks to Chuck Klosterman about whether or not she really hates Katy Perry