When did writing start to feel tenable, if ever? It feels tenable now. It was always plausible. I’m the oldest of five children from the same two parents, and I benefited from being the oldest in a number of ways—primary among which was that I learned to speak and read, and consequently write,…

The recently revealed Facebook data “breach” that allowed Cambridge Analytica to get access to millions of users’ worth of Facebook data has been greeted as a shocking scandal. Reporters and readers have been surprised to learn about the ability to gather personal data on the friends of people who…

Everyone thinks my dog is a puppy. His large, wide-set eyes; small, soft body and playful demeanor belie his maturity and emotional depth — attributes that become obvious once you get to know him. The truth is he’s about four, though the exact date of his birth, like that of many rescue dogs, is…

Page-Turner March 27, 2018 In general, the solid execution of Teen Boss makes the concept behind it—tween-tycoon ambition—even more unnerving.Teen Boss / Bauer Media Group The magazine Teen Boss, styled as Teen Bo$$!, débuted in September of last year. It publishes quarterly, like an earnings…

Portrait by Ann Zhao. The first time I saw Mitski in concert, I spent the day after walking around Toronto calling all my friends, my mom, and my sister, telling them how unbelievable the show was. I had been moved by shows before–mostly huge, performative ones, like Kanye West in a stadium, or…

Naples, Italy 1987 (© Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos) The writer who goes by the name of Elena Ferrante has, over the past 25 years, produced seven novels. The most famous of them— My Brilliant Frie

In the second half of 2017, the phrase “bisexual lighting” slipped into the queer Twitter lexicon. The phenomenon it described — film characters illuminated with deep blue lights on one side and saturated magenta lights on the opposite, which also happens to be the colors of the bisexual pride flag…

Comentario Credit...Hudson Christie La practicidad es la fuerza más subestimada y menos comprendida del mundo actual. Como rectora de las decisiones humanas, podría no ofrecer la emoción ilícita de los deseos sexuales inconscientes de Freud ni la elegancia matemática de los incentivos económicos. La…

Page-Turner February 14, 2018 In some of the past year’s fiction and nonfiction releases, love comes in many forms.Illustration by Kaye Blegvad One cloudless Saturday morning, last February, I sat alone on a bench, in Long Island City, waiting for the bus. The street felt artificially still, like a…

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“Hmm, your blood pressure is low. We’ll check that again in half an hour. Is there any chance you could be pregnant? Wait, of course not; you just had a hysterectomy!” The nurse frowns awkwardly as she administers my blood thinners, the shot you get when you can’t even begin to walk, leaving a…

Takeaway Points: CrossFit used to have a much more controversial presence on the internet than it does today. I've always thought that this fight was mostly silly, an arms race engineered by CrossFit

What do you concentrate on when you’re writing? When you put down a sentence, you don’t always know what it is as you’re writing it. Isn’t that thrilling? This morning, I sat down and thought, “I really am wasting the morning. I have to do something.” I have this pink typewriter that I just got…

How many recognizably queer places are there in any city or town? Queer bars, dance parties, and businesses exist, but their holds on space are always threatened by whims of the government and the market, as evidenced when lesbian and gay bars disappear in highly trafficked places like NYC. But is…

Annals of Appearances February 13, 2018 The gray skin in Michelle Obama’s portrait feels at first like a loss, and then like a real gain.© Amy Sherald The former First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to commission the Baltimore painter Amy Sherald for her official portrait was intriguing. Like the…

Illustration by Ruby Aitken. I first started following @officialseanpenn for its curation of celebrities’ internet presences and Lisa Frank-esque Photoshop work. While it mostly just made me laugh really hard, I also felt a kinship with whoever was behind such a delightful satire of—and love letter…

Six months ago I quit Twitter. It happened in a moment that combined the deepest loathing (both self- and other-directed) and the brightest clarity, and I have not looked back since. Apart from the actual quitting of Twitter, the thing I am most proud of is not having written an essay about it, so I…

Cultural Comment January 18, 2018 The Awl was a place where outsiders and the unpracticed could find a sympathetic audience and an opportunity to sound like themselves.Photograph by Alex Welsh Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so,…

Illustration by Allyssa Yohana. Happy New Year, Rookies! Before we get to this month’s theme: Rookie on Love comes out tomorrow! Our fifth book and the first in a new series, it covers love of all kinds, with contributions from 45 writers, artists, and Rookie readers. I hope you love it very much.…

Late Saturday evening, the website Babe.net published a detailed account of an encounter between “Grace,” an anonymous 23-year-old photographer, and the actor Aziz Ansari. It described a September 2017 incident in which Grace says that she and Ansari went on a date after first meeting at an Emmys…

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not…

Career planning by October 24, 2017 I was at a dinner with eight highly successful professional women recently, ranging in age from 35 to 74. Their stories were typical of research I have been conducting on dual-career couples. One had just been given a huge promotion opportunity in another country,…

On a recent Friday afternoon, I was riding toward the intersection of two major avenues in Brooklyn — Atlantic and Bedford — when the lane markings disappeared and what had been a bike lane became a left turn lane for cars at one of the most chaotic crossings in Brooklyn. It’s a dangerous scenario…

Call Me by Your Name Melissa Anderson Amore caldo! Director Luca Guadagnino adapts André Aciman’s tale of summer love. Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name. Photo: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Image courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino,…

chill Mobile mindfulness: An unscientific review of the Headspace meditation app I once scoffed at heady mindfulness practices. Now, I meditate every day. Valentina Palladino – Dec 1, 2017 8:00 am | 67 Credit: Headspace Credit: Headspace Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more…

Books And why we insist on blaming them for it. November 27, 2017 A generation has inherited a world without being able to live in it.Illustration by Adrian Tomine Imagine, as I often do, that our world were to end tomorrow, and that alien researchers many years in the future were tasked with…

There is a specific queer loneliness in the music of Sufjan Stevens that has made him a central cultural figure to a generation of queer people—cis gay men, especially—with an affinity for melancholy.

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s. I went on dates. I went on a Tinder date with a schoolteacher who read me poetry aloud on his faded leather couch, but he seemed a little too earnest for me, so I went on a Hinge date with a musician who…

I started my meme account, @sensualmemes, on Instagram in the spring of 2016. At the time I was in an on-again, off-again relationship with someone who had sexually abused and emotionally traumatized me, and was attempting to navigate young adulthood against all of the other roadblocks women…

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to The Atavist Magazine today for access to our full archive. Promethea Unbound A child genius raised in poverty, she wanted to change the world. A horrific act of violence nearly destroyed her. By Mike Mariani The Atavist Magazine, No. 72 Mike Mariani is a writer…

Arquivo pessoal “Oi! O Fofão está no Hospital das Clínicas. Amputaram o dedo dele, que estava gangrenado. Ele tem surtos, quer bater em todo mundo e tem que ser amarrado porque arranca todos os acesso

The Latvian student was struggling with his assignment. I had asked all the students in my writing class at Maastricht University in the Netherlands—where instruction was in English—to translate one of their stories into their native language. The Latvian student, B., was one of 23 who had signed up…

It’s useful​ to know on opening Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life – currently, a month before the winner is announced, the 3/1 favourite to win the Man Booker Prize – just how much research she did into the experiences and psychological background of Jude St Francis, the book’s central…

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. “What we mean by accusations of escapism, what escapism is, what it flees and seeks, how it operates, what modes it finds besides the literary—such issues could justify a treatise.” –Robert B. Heilman, “Escape and Escapism: Varieties of…

If you are ever captured in the jungle by a group of men and women who taunt you, insisting they will soon devour your flesh, there are a few tricks you can use to avoid this fate. First, you can pretend to be French. It will probably help if you wail in agony, like a baby, leading them to wonder if…

St. Vincent's latest record, Masseduction, is available Oct. 13. Alex Da Carte/Courtesy of the artist In the decade since her debut as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has earned some of the rarest honors a rock artist could hope for. Her 2014 self-titled LP won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.…

Here are a few of the places I've played Mario Kart in the last two weeks: On the couch. In bed. On the train. In an Uber. On a plane. In a Vegas hotel. At the dog park. In a weirdly long line at Trader Joe's. And, of course, on the toilet, more times than I'm proud of. In every case, all I had to…

If you have to travel a short distance in a city — to run an errand or meet a friend for a drink — how do you get there? In America, at least, your answer is probably not “ride a bike.” “I think our b