(Sub)Culture Features

It’s not exactly clear what will happen to TikTok at 12 a.m. on Jan. 19. According to Reuters, TikTok leadership will comply with the rapidly approaching ban by “going dark.” According to the Biden administration, they’re not going to enforce the law, and the app will continue to be available. …

With just days left before a Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok owner ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets, or otherwise accept a ban of the app in the country, some 170 million American users have pressing questions about what’s about to happen to the mega-popular video platform. The Supreme Court …

Whispers about English author Neil Gaiman‘s behavior with women have circulated in the publishing world for some time, but a bombshell article published in New York magazine this week laid out a horrifying series of allegations that left readers sickened and stunned. Multiple women interviewed for the piece accused him …

In 2019, Myka Stauffer was the voice behind a fairly successful family vlogging channel. She posted about her husband, children, and parenting journey to close to 700,000 subscribers on YouTube and with support from major brands like Pampers, Walmart, and Fabletics. No topic was off limits, so when she adopted …

“Lady Liberty stood me up!” the artist Isabelle Brourman announced, faux-pouting, on a recent Thursday evening at the Will Shott Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. It was the opening of Exhibit 1: Paper Trail, a collection of work Brourman had created alongside courtroom sketch artists during Donald Trump’s …

When Octavia Butler published 1993’s Parable of the Sower — a sci-fi novel about California burning in 2024, following a presidential election of a candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”— her intentions weren’t to prophesize, but rather make an observation backed by historical research and future optimism. “Parable …

In the first verse of “I’d Rather Be Me” from the musical Mean Girls, there’s a note that’s frankly a bit too high for your average voice to sustain. It requires a clear tone and solid belt —a vocal technique that comes from using your chest voice to hit a …

For more than six years, filmmaker Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann embedded with a crew of wildland firefighters in California whose expertise is working with large, high-priority fires. Referred to as Hotshots, these specialists, managed by a band of agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, undergo intensive training …

Amika Mota was drenched, bone-tired, and shaking after her first-ever pump and roll, a fire-fighting technique where the fire truck creeps toward the blaze as personnel wield the massive hose alongside it. It was just her and five other women — along with the fire chief — against a brutal …

This week, as wildfires erupted across Los Angeles, residents anxious for real-time information about the rapidly-shifting perimeters of the fires passed around a tip: download Watch Duty. The app is run by a nonprofit nominally based in Sonoma County, but is staffed by a dozen employees and hundreds of volunteers …