Browse Topics
Gender
Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back
I’ve always enjoyed pickup: the sudden poetry of it, the immediate bond and intimacy among strangers. . . . It’s all guts and very little glory—yet there is some glory, even if only a handful of spectators are watching. One OHHHHHHH, after you cross someone so hard they fall on their ass, can make you hold your head high for the rest of the week.
February 2024Is This Desire?
Clarissa Smith on the Intersection of Human Sexuality and Pornography
Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.
February 2024Macho Baby
I know that what we call hate is sometimes love that was pushed under a rock, love deprived of light and water. “Tell me to what you pay attention,” writes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Man and Crisis, “and I will tell you who you are.” How much love is putrefying inside boys this very moment, starved for nourishment?
December 2023Portrait Of US
Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.
June 2023The Strong, Silent Type
Jaclyn A. Siegel On Masculinity And Male Body Image
Risak: How is the “masculine body” defined?
Siegel: In the U.S. we typically see a mesomorphic ideal: lean, muscular, and with a low body-fat percentage. This is persistent across the U.S. and common in LGBTQ+ communities in particular. Sexual-minority men are at elevated risk for eating disorders due in part to the lean ideal being perpetuated in their communities.
February 2023Sunbeams
February 2023The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whiskey. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.
The Beetle King
My chest, which was beginning to grow round in the wrong places, had to be hidden under a T-shirt no matter how hot or sweaty I became. Out in the desert I had to squat behind the cover of creosote bushes to pee. At home in my family’s Airstream I was my parents’ youngest daughter, but up in the paloverde I felt like one of the boys.
July 2022Falling Behind
Ruth Milkman On The Growing Job Insecurity In America
In terms of security and a sense that you can count on a certain career path in life if you do your part — that’s over for most people. You’re on your own.
May 2022Life, Without Imitation
Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people.
October 2021