The most successful songwriter of the last twenty years is a forty-four year old Swede, Max Martin.

Jason Dill is rebuilding one of the coolest skate brands on the planet, one hand-cut collage at a time.

The world is consumed by violent fights and hostile disagreements. Sarah Schulman sees a way out of them.

For the past two decades, the micronation of Westarctica has grown in prominence—and is now using its power for something other than Antarctic domination.

Next is "culture training," in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. "The most marketable skill in India today," the Guardian wrote in 2003, "is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else's."

College is when we first get drunk. Euripides’ The Bacchae can help us learn how to do it right.

A young girl is reported missing. The detective assigned to her case quickly discovers she’s been gone for years. The story of his search for justice.

“The true impact of activism may not be felt for a generation. That alone is reason to fight.”

How the disappearing bayou town of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana is trying to delay its inevitable end.

A secret network of women is working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide safe, cheap home abortions.

John Muir’s romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil.

A youth set to the shifting sounds of CCM, Christian Contemporary Music:

This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking Diet, “Wait, this is Christian?”

It comes from the soil of the desert Southwest. Inhaled, it can cause incurable, even fatal illness. And, thanks to global warming, valley fever is spreading fast.

On the dangerous glut of visitors looking to conquer Mt. Everest, where there is sometimes a two-hour wait to climb the Hillary Step.

Pennsylvania is on the verge of saying yes.

An ode to professional basketball players and why pro ball is the best ball of all.

“Which is the largest country in the world, economically speaking? It’s America, the United States. Do you know why? Because way back—this is history, you can look it up on the Internet—the colonization was done by men who believed in the word of God. And they were tithers. That’s why you see on the dollar bill: ‘In God we trust.”

Madrid, 1937:

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

“A curious thing about the United States is that anticommunism has always been far louder and more potent than communism.”

Most of what you know about women’s fertility rates is wrong.

It’s legal to buy poppy seeds in America and it’s legal to plant them—unless you’re familiar with the simple process of turning them into opium, that is. Then having poppies in your garden is a felony.

Data is the lifeblood of a functioning government. Over the past four years, the Trump administration has destroyed, disappeared, or distorted vast swaths of the information the state needs to protect the vulnerable, safeguard our health, and alert us to emerging crises.

Four dispatches from the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.

Amazon, America’s most valuable retailer, is “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.”