There are trends you adopt and trends that adopt you. Skinny jeans had their era. Balayage rose and fell like a Bravo subplot. Cottagecore trotted through the culture like a well-behaved deer. But the Peter…
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In Which I Cast On and Immediately Lose the Will to Live: Swatching, ADHD, and the Bureaucracy of Knitting
The yarn is beautiful. I want to be clear about this. The yarn is a gorgeous fingering-weight merino in a colorway called something like “Fjord Dusk” or “Heathered Mythology,” and it arrived in the mail...
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Let us now Praise Japanese Pens
I didn’t intend to become a person who has opinions about pens. I want to be clear about that. It happened incrementally — the way most conversions happen, I suppose — not in a flash...
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Big Feelings About Big Clothes: On the Oversized Trend and My Ongoing Internal Negotiations
There is a silhouette currently stalking the runways, the street style blogs, and every fashion-adjacent Instagram account I follow, and it goes like this: billowing, voluminous, deliberately ungainly, a jacket the size of a small...
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Why Everything Looks the Same Now: A Small Inquiry into Design Homogeny
There’s a peculiar moment that happens when you open a new direct-to-consumer website. A faint déjà vu drifts in: the clean sans-serif font, the soothing beige palette, the strategically casual photography of a person in...
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Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About Sovereign Wealth Funds
If you’ve been skimming headlines lately, you may have noticed a curious phrase popping up in places it didn’t used to live. Sovereign wealth funds are suddenly buying sports teams, backing AI startups, investing in...
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Cottage Cheese’s Comeback: A Case Study In Food Culture
There are certain foods that carry emotional baggage, and cottage cheese is one of them. It is not neutral the way toast is neutral, or the way a respectable banana minds its own business. Cottage...
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The Boob Light: A Cultural History
of the World’s Most Ubiquitous, Unkillable Overhead Fixture Every apartment has one.Every renter has cursed one.Every landlord defends it like it’s a beloved heirloom. Yes, we’re talking about the boob light: that squat, semi-flush overhead...
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Zara dot com: Where Functionality Goes to Die*
*wearing an impossibly chic trenchcoat. Zara’s website is not a website. Zara’s website is a conceptual art installation about the futility of human desire. It is a maze, a riddle, a mood board created by...
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If Homeopathic Remedies Are BS, Then Why Are They So Huge In Europe?
Homeopathy is the wellness world’s Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously ineffective and beloved. In the U.S., most of us file it under “polite placebo.” In Europe, however, it’s practically embedded into civic infrastructure. Under the cool green...
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QUIZ: Which Analog Hobby Is Right for You?
Finally, a quiz that tells you whether you should be knitting smug little scarves or whispering emotional confessions to a sourdough starter. Welcome to your personalized guide to escaping screen-based despair. Analog hobbies are having...
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