Culture

Winter’s bleakest days have set in. “The holidays” are a distant memory. Rose-colored resolutions to wake up earlier, eat healthier and exercise have gone the way of Dry January — all a wash, as you quickly discovered the only antidote for your Seasonal Affective Disorder was something equally cold and dark. You glimpse the N/A beers in the back of the fridge the same way you spy the sun — in passing, and with a feeling of faded hopefulness. As you lug bags of empty bottles to your sidewalk, you glance up at the brightish blob lending a hazy glow to the grayscale landscape. You deposit your clanging bag of glass and cans beside your Christmas tree’s corpse and shuffle back inside to refill the fridge and cover up reminders of your dalliance with the sober-curious.

Cockburn would usually think twice about celebrating a man that’s under his wife’s thumb. But after seeing reports that Kanye West's new wife Bianca Censori “runs the show,” Cockburn can’t help but think that arrangement is probably for the best. The forty-five-year-old disgraced rapper shocked fans last month when he married the Yeezy architectural designer Censori, in a top-secret ceremony just two months after finalizing his divorce from Kim Kardashian. A source told the Sun, "Bianca runs the show. She has been around Ye for about three years, things got serious really fast in mid-November. "Bianca handles Ye's daily logistics from Yeezy clothing management to construction of the new Yeezy headquarters/ Donda Academy.

My brothers and I grew up in a very active household. We were always busy with sports, schoolwork, and chores, and there was a constant revolving door of friends and teammates. Both of my parents worked full-time as business owners and as our informal chauffeurs. Along with thousands of meals to be prepared, loads of laundry to be done, fights to break up, and the occasional window to be replaced, ours was a house that was never quiet, especially when my brothers tapped their illegal fireworks stash. To an outsider, it might have looked like being in the middle of a domesticated Lord of the Flies. But there was a purpose to the madness and chaos. We learned conflict management, independence, fire safety, and the value of hard work and cooperation.

UFC president Dana White’s new show Power Slap: Road to the Title debuted on January 18 to paltry ratings — a reported 295,000 viewers following a helpful lead-in from the pro wrestling show AEW Dynamite, which had nearly a million — and widespread critical outrage due to the seeming inhumanity of the sport. Those who did tune in watched in mute horror as Chris Kennedy was brutally knocked out, his hands curling up in what Chris Nowinski, a former football player and wrestler turned brain trauma researcher, referred to as “fencing posture,” indicative of serious brain injury — then later proved unable to recollect what had happened to him.

On a windy morning thirty years ago, the FBI staged a surprise attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who followed the apocalyptic preaching of their self-styled prophet, David Koresh. They had been holed up in their ramshackle retreat for fifty-one days. Finally, at 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, tanks broke through the compound’s flimsy walls, firing tear gas at the people inside. The gas was meant to end the standoff by flushing the Davidians out, but Koresh had handed out Army-surplus gas masks. Some of the Davidians took shelter. Others shot at the tanks and federal agents outside. Hours later, fire leveled the compound. Several Davidians burned to death.

Add your tropical dream vacation/work trip/family wedding to the list of lingering Covid consequences. If you’re like me, every time you head to the airport these days, you brace for your flight to be delayed or cancelled. It’s not just in our heads. If it seems that air travel has gotten less reliable since the the pandemic hit, that’s because it has. Reuters reported in August 2022 that “flight cancellations and delays by US airlines in the first seven months of the year have surpassed the comparable 2019 period.” Many of these disruptions were weather-related, but a pilot I spoke to emphasized ongoing airline staffing shortages as the biggest headache at the airport. He told me that heading into 2019, airlines were facing the biggest pilot shortage in history.

On the face of things, there is little in common between Prince Harry and Andrew Tate. Yet look closer and you see two sides of the same coin: a narcissistic version of modern masculinity that warps what's actually important about manhood for the demands of an addicted audience. Tate is a juvenile accused sex trafficker, who believes his right as an HGH-fueled muscle man entitles him to a Conan the Barbarian Romanian fantasy of Bugattis, baby oil and bitches. Harry is a pussy-whipped blue blood who wields his grief gestalt as a weapon against all comers — be they media or monarchy. Tate's narcissism is more aggressive.

Over the last few days, as far as I’m aware, I have been the sole defender of the successful children of the rich. So-called "nepo babies" have been unfairly attacked by the very jealous, mainly middling journalists, who have decided that the greatest crime of these talented few was simply being born. “We love them, we hate them, we disrespect them, we’re obsessed with them,” read Vulture’s front cover, along with a photo illustration of famous progeny. The spawn included Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny and Vanessa Paradis, and Dakota Johnson, whose parents are Melanie Griffiths and Don Johnson. The author of the piece seems to think that the only reason anybody knows the aforementioned names is because of their parents' status and connection.

I first quit a substance at the tender age of nineteen, when heroin addiction brought me to my knees within a year. It was my freshman year of college and I’d started using it with my boyfriend. Our primary method of using was “chasing the dragon”: a process that involved putting some black tar on a piece of tinfoil and “chasing” the vapors from the heated tar using a tube — usually just a plastic Bic pen with the ink tube removed. It didn’t take long for me to lose everything. It was the first time I was ever fired from a job. My parents had to pack up the apartment I was living in and withdraw me from college. When I checked into the hospital, I weighed eighty-nine pounds and had bronchitis that had gone untreated for months.

1922 saw its fair share of shocks in the literary world, among them the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But perhaps the strangest book-related event of the year didn’t involve any writing at all, at least not as performed by human agency. Instead, the author was a ghost. The setting was a darkened room at the Ambassador Hotel in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, where on the warm Sunday afternoon of June 18, 1922, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame sat down between his wife Jean and the celebrated escapologist Harry Houdini to hold a séance. The first two of these individuals were advocates of spiritualism, the last of them a skeptic.