After Adam died, I started listening to dubstep. I think my grief registered in a way where the only viable option to make myself feel better was to slowly blow out my eardrums with Skrillex and Knife Party. His wasn’t the kind of stereotypical death you see...
Last fall, economist Angus Deaton won a Nobel prize for discovering that $75,000 was a magic number. Specifically, a magic salary: It’s the “happiness plateau,” his studies concluded, above which further increases will have minimal impact on a person’s day-to-day sense of well-being. When Deaton and psychologist...
My grandfather was a Dick. I mean his name was Dick. Technically, his name was Richard, but all we ever called him was Dick. So, yeah, my grandfather was a Dick. Not a big Dick — he wasn’t an exceptionally large man, 6 feet tall — but a Dick, no less....
For Mike Orr, a.k.a. “Sweet Lips,” escapism comes in the form of Wasteland Weekend: an annual four-day post-apocalyptic festival held in the Southern California desert that attracts thousands of people from around the country. It’s basically a giant celebration of end-of-the-world culture, where, per Sweet Lips,...
The YouTube video opens with a photo of a 14-year-old boy, painfully thin — 5 feet 7 inches, 98 pounds. His ribs and collarbones protrude. His head of dirty-blond hair, swept to one side, looks too big for his neck. His mouth is agape, as if he’d...
In April of this year, Postmates began delivering Chipotle through an “exclusive partnership” — a win for anyone too lazy to hit up their beloved taqueria in person. But the chain is hardly the only one to bring fast food, quickly, to the homebound masses. McDonald’s now offers “McDelivery,”...
There’s nothing unusual about emerging from a warehouse party in L.A. at 6 a.m. to see the greyish light and smoggy sun make downtown’s bricks and cement glow, sickly birds chirping and pupils dilating. It’s the inverse of the golden hour, usually shared by Uber drivers, truckers...
Self-labeled sex addicts often speak about their identities very clinically, as if they’re paralyzed by a scientific condition that functions the same way as drug and alcohol addiction. But sex and porn “addiction” are NOT the same as alcoholism or a cocaine habit. In fact, hypersexuality and...
