Tag Archives: culture-features

Six days before El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law went into effect, Mario Gómez was dragged from his car, handcuffed, and detained. There was no arrest warrant for the software developer, who had taken to his personal Twitter account to inform the Salvadoran public about the cryptocurrency that was soon going to …

Sheila Nevins won so many Emmys, Oscars, Peabodys, and other awards during her 30 years helming HBO’s documentary division that there’s a trophy room nicknamed for her at the network’s headquarters. Still, the 83-year-old producer, who now heads MTV’s documentary arm, has never tired of the form, never thought of …

A s a kid growing up in the small Texas town of Navasota, Jose Alfaro spent his summers playing in the pastures and creeks near his home, examining bugs and frogs, crawfish and turtles. “It was one of those towns where tractors hold up traffic,” he says. Trains slowed things …

On a cloudy day in May, I meet the TikTok Creator @tweakseason near Madison Square Park, where he’s filming before his shift at Trader Joe’s. When he gets his phone out to shoot a video of a nice car parked on the street, he takes maybe a few seconds to …

T his story begins in 1982 with less than half a man — a pile of bones discovered under a layer of February snow, his broken skull smiling up at an adolescent worker behind his family’s factory. The bones were far from home, discarded in small-town Twinsburg, Ohio, which got …

Filmmaker John Waters, the proud “Pope of Trash,” is no stranger to weird questions. But at a recent audience Q&A when someone asked him, “How did you avoid getting cancer?” he was flummoxed. “I thought, ‘I did smoke, I’m 76 — I guess it is a fair question,’” he says …

In March of 1997, Anne Heche and Ellen DeGeneres were a happy couple in the flushes of new love. But when Heche wanted to bring her girlfriend to her upcoming movie premiere —the disaster thriller Volcano, in which Heche was starring opposite Tommy Lee Jones —20th Century Fox, she later …

Karina Longworth’s house is, quite possibly, haunted. This is not necessarily something she has experienced herself, she tells me of her pale-pink 1926 Mediterranean, where Longworth could be found one July morning on the frond-shadowed patio. But it is something she has on authority from a friend who drunkenly stumbled …

To paraphrase Cher Horowitz, searching for authenticity on a social media app is like trying to find meaning in a Pauly Shore film. Yet that hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley from trying. Apps like VSCO, Cluster, We Heart It, and Dispo all aim to take the pressure off curating one’s flawlessly …

In September 2002, Kaja Sokola was a 16-year-old model newly arrived in Manhattan from her native Poland. While attending an event whose guest list was curated by her agency — NEXT Model Management, one of the biggest and most successful modeling firms in the world — the 5’11” teen with …