A Mexican man reluctantly provides cultural insights to a pandering white American journalist.

"Two years before, Samuel Kramer had arrived to write the nteenth feature on Frida Kahlo. Someone told him I wrote screenplays for tough documentaries, and he paid me to accompany him through a city he considered savage and explain things he called mythical."

John Ross, rebel reporter, became the sort of devoted gringo scribe who would give up drugs and drinking in order to better write about the native revolutionaries; the sort of man who used dolls to preach armed revolution to high schoolers in the weeks after September 11th.

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.

The author gets a security guard job at this aging textile factory. Part of the City by City project.

The first entry in the City by City project, on a Baltimore funeral:

My homeboy is interred at a cemetery with a swan lake where we used to take our girls at night because it was a park with a lake and it was just over the line and in the county.

With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

On the emerging student loan bubble.

"I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both 'keep up' with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests."

An essay on technology’s reach into daily life.

The abridged history of a Brooklyn culture war.

On America’s two literary fiction cultures and why one will endure.

Notes on a summer spent aboard an industrial fishing boat off the Alaskan coast.

A Pynchon conference in Lublin, Poland may say more about the men (yes, only men) who attend Thomas Pynchon conferences than the works of the reclusive author.

The editors of N+1 recap the revolution that is/was the internet with pit-stops to survey the Bolshevik Revolution, the NYT’s messy relationship with tech, and the value of an ad.