Tag Archives: culture-features

T he two Americans left late on May 2nd, 2020, well after dark had fallen on an arid beach near Castilletes, in northern Colombia. The men, both ex-Special Forces, had been waiting to pile into a flat-bottomed boat stocked with guns and ammunition and about 50 Venezuelan revolutionaries for a …

“The history and the story of immigration here is one of, primarily, exploitation,” says Isa Noyola. Noyola, a transgender activist based in Phoenix, is the deputy director of Mijente, one of the country’s most prominent immigrant-rights organizations, representing Latinx communities around the country. When Biden was declared the winner of …

On July 30th, model and influencer Helen Owen, who has more than a million followers, deviated from her typical fare of Mexican-beachside dinner videos and lush-haired bikini images to post a photo of herself and her boyfriend with their mouths bound, holding a sandwich board that read, “Speak up for …

Denis Hayes is the Mark Zuckerberg of the environmental movement, if you can imagine Mark Zuckerberg with a conscience and a lot less cash. Like Zuckerberg, Hayes dropped out of Harvard to start an eccentric and unpromising venture. Zuckerberg’s was called Facebook, which he launched in 2004; Hayes’ was called …

The noise that a helicopter makes resonates differently here in Los Angeles. The blades reverberate through our neighborhoods more forebodingly here, often conjuring images of police and media surveillance. You hardly ever hear a chopper and think that something is going right. Typically, the sound evokes calamity. After this hazy …

When a group of bills known as SESTA/FOSTA was introduced in early 2018, it garnered widespread bipartisan support. The bills were intended to curb online sex trafficking, a goal that was easy for lawmakers to get behind, and one that few wanted to be seen actively opposing. One of the …

For sex workers everywhere, being asked to “Fill in the gap in your resume,” is a standard question during job interviews. Skills like bondage and pole dancing are usually omitted and replaced with Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. But for the comic book series Safe Sex (stylized as SFSX), a …

Every generation has a Halloween meme that exists somewhere in the Venn diagram of weird, scary, and vaguely horny. For boomers, it’s the Monster Mash; for Gen X, it’s the scene in Ghostbusters where Dan Aykroyd gets a blowie from a ghost; for GenY, it’s the KXVO Pumpkin Dance Guy …

Twin sister indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara have always specialized in remaking well-worn forms in their own image — from their early days turning coffee shop confessionals into sharp power pop to their recent emergence as Top 40 contenders who can write glossy dance-pop with a uniquely nuanced urgency, Now, …

Six weeks ago, an 18-year-old male patient showed up to NYU Winthrop Hospital in Long Island complaining about chest pain, nausea, fever, and shortness of breath. Initially, doctors thought he had pneumonia, due to his X-rays showing “haziness” in the lungs. Within 48 hours, says Melodi Pirzada, chief of pediatric …