Empire of the Census
The history of the census has always been one of outright manipulation, politicization, and marginalization.
Outbursts
From the Magazine
Tales from the Cryptos
Cryptocurrency investors were enticed to Puerto Rico because the money was right and the risks were low.
Taming the Savage White Man
The western’s spirit is everywhere—not unlike one of the mid-twentieth century’s great augurs of the vanishing frontier, the ghost of Tom Joad.
Astrology Year Zero
This essay was due on November 6, 2018, but I didn’t finish it on time.
Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman
#MeToo has not much altered the science professions and it won’t until the culture of science is dismantled and rebuilt.
I’m Feeling Bad About America
The campaign song is frequently the porch popular music crawls beneath before it rolls into the fetal position and dies.
Party Monsters
Our most prominent television critics seem solely interested in defining the best and the greatest.
The Duckie and the Anal Plug
All plausible deniability aside, it was very clearly an anal plug.
If You’ve Got the Money
“Country” culture has ironically diverted itself into the ethical trashcans of both coasts.
America and Its Discontents
It will be left to future historians, if there are any, to explain to their contemporaries why a profession came into existence in the twentieth century whose well paid practitioners sat in an office while people otherwise unknown to them talked about their unhappiness, one ...
Hitler ENTJ
In an essay that she wrote in 1937 but never published called “My Country ’Tis of Thee—The Cult of Leadership,” Katharine Briggs, co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, took a faithfully Jungian approach to typing Adolf Hitler’s personality. On a ...
Storified
In 1995, the story goes, a woman complained to her fiancé that she was having trouble expanding her collection of Pez dispensers. So he built an online marketplace to help her track down fellow traders and launched the site as a “love token” on Labor Day. Within months, ...