Five Articles
A couple’s been together five years and they barely have sex anymore. Both of them want to—neither’s holding back intentionally—but the gap between comfort and desire is wider than you’d think, and they can’t seem to cross it. It’s the kind of problem that exists in a lot of relationships but doesn’t get talked about much. A therapist named Angelika Eck wrote about it for Zeit Magazine, about how eroticism survives in long-term relationships, and reading it felt like someone finally naming something you already knew was wrong.
Drag queens got mainstream. TV, parades, bars in every city. But drag kings—women performing the exaggeration of men—are still on the margins somehow, which makes no sense. Hazel Cills wrote about them for Jezebel, looking at why the inverse of drag never got the same cultural moment. There’s something weirder and probably more interesting happening in that space that nobody’s paying attention to.
Mark Zuckerberg is absurdly short. Like, actually tiny. Facebook controls his image carefully because power and height are tangled in our collective mind—you need to seem big to seem powerful—and if he’s going to run for president, as the rumors suggest, he needs to look like a man who could lead. Maria Bustillos wrote about this on Medium, and the whole thing is funny in a way that you can’t unsee.
Counterfeit sneakers are a full economy now because the real ones cost $200-300 and will be out of style in a week. Hypebeasts in their Supreme and Yeezys exist in this weird space—are they actually stylish or just wearing logos like identity? Kevin Lozano looked at the fake sneaker market for GQ, and yeah, the knockoffs might be the truest thing about the whole scene.
Brad Kim created Know Your Meme ten years ago. Ten years of documenting every weird corner of internet culture. In an interview with Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Verge, he talked about what it’s done to him: he can’t believe in anything anymore. His mother’s faith, his childhood faith—the internet took that. He’s seen too much. You see enough of how people actually behave online, and something in you dies.