(Sub)Culture Features

By June 2021, Erick Louis was tired of seeing fellow Black creators on TikTok getting ripped off. Viral dance videos helped songs like Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” shoot up the pop charts, but the more those dances were copied, the less the people …

Stormy Daniels had never been intimidated by big-talking men. If anything, it’s the other way around. The porn star who Donald Trump failed to muzzle with hush money and an NDA faced her disgraced former lawyer Michael Avenatti Thursday in a Manhattan federal court, where he stands accused of forging …

It’s hard to imagine a more outlandish origin story than Rosebud Baker’s accidental debut as a stand-up comedian. It happened during a White House dinner and, as Baker recalls, it was a disaster. The granddaughter of Secretary of State James Addison Baker III, she was barely seven years old when …

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are both literally and figuratively red-hot, in that they’re trendy and also contribute to global warming. In the last few months, environmentalists have slammed blockchain enthusiasts for catapulting a technology into the mainstream that requires a whole lot of energy, but are they right in doing …

Heat is entropy. Heat is chaos. The hotter something gets, the more kinetic energy it has: molecules vibrate, relationships change, life overheats, things die. You can see that out west right now. Last week, a heat dome formed over the Great Plains all the way out to the California coast. …

This column is a collaboration withDoubleBlind, a print magazine and media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement. Erinn Baldeschwiler had already been having a rough go of it. A mother of two teens, she was going through a divorce, moving out of her house, and splitting from her …

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died last month just 30 days shy of his 102nd birthday, lived a life of fascinating contradictions. From a Dickensian childhood — his father died before he was born, and his mother was institutionalized when he was only two years old — Ferlinghetti eventually landed with wealthy …

Dr. Nicole Van Groningen is exhausted. A hospitalist and assistant professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Van Groningen has been on the front lines fighting Covid-19 for 11 months, and as L.A. comes down from its worst surge in cases since the pandemic began, she’d spent the final …

I t was November 24th, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, and Tina Mucklow and her Twin Cities-based flight crew — three flight attendants and three pilots — were beginning what should have been four or five days of flying, working through the holiday. Mucklow was the newest hire and lowest-ranked …

Ten minutes into What the Constitution Means to Me, writer and performer Heidi Schreck is teaching the audience the word “penumbra”: “Here I am, standing in the light,” Schreck says from the front of the stage, “and there you are, sitting in the darkness. This space between us, this space …