Americans Are Living in an Alternate History
As the pandemic has raged on, popular culture has found new ways to ask an old question: What could have been instead?
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Culture
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Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope
"I want the courage to need very little and demand a lot."
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America Is Officially in ‘Fuck It’ Mode
When doing the right thing is too hard, we give up and let fate run wild
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The Paranoid Style in American Entertainment
How the mechanisms of reality TV taught us to trust no one
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How a Nuclear Submarine Officer Learned to Live in Tight Quarters - Issue 84: Outbreak - Nautilus
I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a nuclear submarine officer running secret missions…
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The American restaurant is on life support
We’re eating at street-corner stalls, food trucks, and the grocery. Restaurants might not be here when we get back.
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Baseball, Fiction, and Life: Roger Angell’s Era-Spanning Career at The New Yorker
It is tempting to view Roger Angell, who is now ninety-nine, as a keeper of this publication’s institutional memory. But he’s more likely to say, “I learned something truly amazing today!”
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Galactic Settlement and the Fermi Paradox - Issue 80: Aliens - Nautilus
A spacefaring species could easily settle the entire Milky Way given billions of years. Yet the fact is that there is no obvious one…
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The Age of Instagram Face
How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look.
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Fighting Crime With San Diego’s Real-Life Superhero Squad | MEL Magazine
It’s a cool night in downtown San Diego on the weekend before Halloween, and I’m standing outside the Hall of Justice in an astronaut costume,...
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An Unfiltered Oral History of the Marlboro Man
“Mild as May” That was the original advertising slogan for Marlboro cigarettes when they first hit the market in the 1920s. Decades before the rugged...
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Why millennials and Gen Z love "Friends"
This Gen X sitcom endures because it sells younger fans on the appeal of working through life in second gear
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I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan
He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.
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Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?
He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.
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Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man - Issue 74: Networks - Nautilus
Today the alkaline desert is quiet. The roar of techno music and flamethrowers has been replaced with the soft clink of rakes and…
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How the ‘Octochamps’ Broke the National Spelling Bee
As the quality of the top contestants has ramped up dramatically in recent years, the national competition has struggled to keep up.
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The Ancient Rites That Gave Birth to Religion - Issue 72: Quandary - Nautilus
The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief…
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Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden
Women are increasingly playing the role of best friend, lover, and on-call therapist to their male partners.
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Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer
'James’s performance, I’m sure, is causing grief for an accountant somewhere.'
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The Humanities: The Next Frontier for Korea's Chaebol | Korea Exposé
South Korea's big family-controlled conglomerates have identified the humanities as an antidote to their paralysis of innovation.
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Why ‘Bless Your Heart’ Is the Most Savage Insult in the Country
Bless your heart is not really a compliment. It sounds sweet as pie, and sometimes is said affectionately about pitiable situations, but it’s often acid-tongued...
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The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation - Issue 70: Variables - Nautilus
In 2011, a friend of mine in college asked me if I’d read The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan…
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How translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible – Robert Alter | Aeon Ideas
No translation of the Bible has tried to maintain both the meaning and the melody of the Hebrew scriptures – until now
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Why Does Every Tech Ad Use the Same Song? Because of This Man.
You're already listening to music by Steven Gutheinz, you just don't know it.
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Echos - Issue 68: Context - Nautilus
Before Corrine’s husband abandoned her in Berlin, he liked to say that her name reminded him of the word “corrupt.” But ending…
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How We’ll Forget John Lennon - Issue 68: Context - Nautilus
A few years ago a student walked into the office of Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab.…
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An Rx for Doctors - Issue 66: Clockwork - Nautilus
Every physician remembers their first bad case. Mine went like this. One morning, a man came into our emergency department with back…
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How Millennial Hipsters Revitalized — and Likely Destroyed — PBR
Pabst Blue Ribbon may be on its last cans. To many, the news may be like seeing a death notice and swearing that person died...
