Tag Archives: culture-features

One summer in the late 1980s, when Eli Frankel was about 15, his father gave him a gift. An active part of the 1960s counterculture, the elder Frankel thought his teenage son should be reading more, so one day he brought him Helter Skelter, the 1972 true-crime bestseller about Charles …

If each of the graduating members of the Class of 2020 took 30 seconds to cross the stage at commencement, the Quaranteen University graduation planning team calculated, the commencement ceremony would take five hours. More than 500 seniors were registered to walk in the experimental ceremony, scheduled for May 22nd, …

Until the September 11th attacks, the tragedy in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978 represented the largest number of American civilian casualties in a single non-natural event. It is unfathomable now, as it was then, that more than 900 Americans – members of a San Francisco-based religious group called the Peoples …

It’s just a guy in jeans and a T-shirt, walking onto a stage, nearly empty except for a stool and a microphone. You wouldn’t know who the guy who walks into the frame is at first — or rather, you wouldn’t know had you not just downloaded it from his …

It’s been seven months since I held my mother’s hand as she died in hospice from leukemia. For the first six of those months I traveled nonstop, working remotely and visiting friends and family, partly to catch up on what I had missed in the year and a half that …

O n Instagram she was “escty,” the Lolita goth princess, pouting and preening next to heart-shaped handcuffs, Louis Vuitton-branded handguns, and bound-and-gagged Hello Kittys. She was also “beegtfo,” the girl next door, mugging with her sister in Christmas photos, donning pastel barrettes and holding her toddler half-sister to her hip. …

Approximately once in a generation (and by generation, we mean news cycle), there emerges a trope that takes the experience of young womanhood — in all its beautiful, maddening, tumultuous, tear-stained glory — and flattens it to the point that it means virtually nothing. In the 1980s, it was the …

Jacqueline Novak is worried about her entrance. “I remember reading magazines as a teenager, and the description of the person on their way in to the interview would stick with me,” the writer and comedian says over lunch at Via Carota in Manhattan’s West Village. “I remember Maggie Gyllenhaal once …

Amanda Knox heads to Italy this weekend to “face her fears” where much of the population still think she’s guilty of murdering her roommate 12 years ago. Like Steve Bannon, Knox is another American export Italians can’t seem to keep out. But the visit is a good time to remember …

The fourth and final chapter of Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed Netflix miniseries When They See Us is entirely about the prison ordeal of Korey Wise, the oldest member of the Central Park Five. He had a vastly different experience than the other four boys after their conviction for the brutal 1989 …