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From the Magazine

Dickheads
Some people (me, for instance) put a great deal of energy into organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic power? It’s not as if other parts of a formal suit—white shirts, ...

Idle Threads
BOOKS REVIEWED Women in Clothes, by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, Blue Rider Press, $30 Worn Stories, by Emily Spivack, Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95 Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades ...

Three Strikes! [1]
© Katherine Streeter I made nice.[2] It didn’t work. Women are still oppressed, men still running the show. They’re still running around raping, killing, and maiming women—raping, killing, and maiming children too (which is really just another way of ...

Purple Reign
When the great granddaddy of opinion journals, The New Republic, abruptly vanished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and management theory last winter, establishment journalists rent their garments and gnashed their teeth in horror. “The promise of American life has been ...

VCs Take the Media
Alex Blumberg wanted to start a business. The veteran radio producer had established himself with such prestige radio programs as This American Life and Planet Money. But in 2014 he decided he was ready to strike out on his own—to build a podcasting network featuring several ...

The Taming of Tech Criticism
BOOK REVIEWED The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, $26.95 What does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question seems easy: to be a technology critic in America now is to ...

Buffalo Exchange
During the winter of 2014, at roughly the same time, two projects laying claim to the future were unveiled in Buffalo, New York. One was Buffalo State College’s proposal to offer the world’s first PhD program in Creativity Studies. The other was a state plan to build ...

Satirized for Your Consumption
We live in an age of satirical excess. If economists were to diagnose it, they might well call it a comedy bubble. We currently have six late-night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of-the-party, white-guy topical jokers—Conan, Kimmel, Fallon, James Corden, Seth Meyers, ...

Toxically Pure
Shortly before the first election of the second President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced his third wife that they should move from Oregon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled literary ...

The Monk Retires
The phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving ...