(Sub)Culture Features

Journalist Alissa Quart’s new book, “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream,”seeks to discover the origins of two important American myths: that of the self-made man and that of the “the undeserving poor.” What is behind our country’s relentless demand for lonesome achievement and personal responsibility? Quart calls “bootstrapping” — …

On a stormy Monday night in New York City, a girl in a massive pink ballgown appears at the top of a spiral staircase. “Hi everyone!” she calls as the audience below her erupts into ecstatic applause. Her friends fill in dozens of rows, her father is front and center. …

“My name is Kevin Hart and I WORK HARD!!!” reads the Twitter bio of comedian Kevin Hart. You can’t deny the hustle: Hart consistently ranks among the highest-paid comedians, collaborates with big names on high-profile movie projects and, through his two separate production companies, maintains a dizzying number of partnerships …

What do Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, and a top-down convertible ride on a cliff in Majorca have to do with folk-rock legend Cass Elliot? The answer — like most things nowadays — involves a new meme sweeping TikTok. Taken from a scene in the 2022 film The Unbearable Weight of …

You may know 24-year-old Jimmy Donaldson — a.k.a. MrBeast — as the YouTuber behind such elaborate stunts as a real-life Squid Game reenactment and “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.” His videos across several channels have netted him hundreds of millions of followers and billions of views. But Donaldson has …

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have seemed to be everywhere in media following high-profile appearances including an exclusiveOprah special and their recent six-episode limiteddocumentary seriesreleased byNetflix. Then there was the release of the prince’s memoir Spare in January, which delved into the stream-of-consciousness minutiae that made “you feel as if …

Three months. That’s how long it took for HQ Trivia to go from unknown mobile game to household name with a record 2.38 million users at once. Now, six years later, a new documentary, Glitch: The Rise And Fall Of HQ Trivia, aims to tell the scandalous behind-the-scenes story of …

Tennessee became the first state in the country to restrict public drag performances on Thursday. Republican Gov. Bill Lee also signed legislation banning minors from receivinggender-affirming care andprohibiting surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender youth. The Republican governor, who appeared in drag in a 1977 high-school yearbook photo, promised to …

Marissa is 35 years old, married, with a first grader and a stressful job as a sonographer. To take the edge off, she watches TV — soapy dramas on Hulu, mostly, like Shadowhunters and Motherland: Fort Salem. During the pandemic, she started to see this one particular commercial a lot. …

In recent years, Coconut Kitty had begun to contemplate the benefits of a quiet life. She had long been a popular presence on Instagram, with over 5 million followers flocking to her NSFW posts and OnlyFans account, but lately, her sisters say, she’d been working toward a change. She was …