(Sub)Culture Features

Unless you’re a celebrity who dies or the author of an incendiary New York Timesop-ed, it’s fairly difficult to go viral during the tepid holiday news cycle. Yet one news story managed to break through the tedium of the waning days of 2022, about an AI assistant that reportedly encouraged …

It started with a bang, the sound of metal crashing down on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C. as hundreds of Trumpers stormed the Capitol. It continued into another pandemic year; for every two steps we took forward with vaccines and testing, we were knocked back one by variants and those …

In the early hours of July 1st, 1981, for the umpteenth time in his life, Scott Thorson found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Specifically, he was at a drug kingpin’s house when the man gave the order for one of Los Angeles’ most infamous mass killings: …

W hen Jonathan Webb arrived at the 500-acre former cattle farm he purchased in 2019, it was essentially an empty green field. He bought an RV and set it up on a hill with the water tower behind him and Daniel Boone National Forest out front. When massive, earth-moving construction …

In June 2021, pop singer Billie Eilish put out the music video to her newly released single, “Lost Cause.” The video features Eilish at a sleepover with a handful of her girl friends. As a promotion for the video, she posted a set of photos of behind-the-scenes moments with the …

Let me preface this by saying that vaccines are kind of my jam. My father is a doctor. I believe in science, not conspiracy theories. When a pediatrician has offered one of my kids a vaccine in the past, I have accepted that offer as I would a free upgrade …

When You author Caroline Kepnes sat down to write the third book in the series, You Love Me, she made like main character Joe Goldberg: She stalked the living daylights out of random residents of Bainbridge Island to get a sense of the place — a.k.a. Joe’s new home. Joe …

According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), there are currently at least 144 known cannabinoids that have been isolated from the cannabis plant. The most popular among them is Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound known to provide all the stereotypical effects of getting high. Yet a lesser-known cannabinoid, …

There was a special mix of shame and liberation when you visited a gay bookstore that contained adult material. When I ventured into my first one in the Nineties, you might start out flipping through an Edmund White or Andrew Holleran novel before slowly making your way to the magazines: …

At the start of last month, Buffy Montgomery, 35, was a massage therapist by day, and a professional mermaid (officially, an “underwater performer”) by night. By the end of the month, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fort Lauderdale native was neither. “It literally was one minute I had a …