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...
Naturally, we begin with a snake. In late May, a 10-foot python crawled from 38-year-old Atthaporn Boonmakchuay’s squat toilet in his home in Thailand and latched onto his penis. There are conflicting reports about what happened next. But somehow either Boonmakchuay and/or his wife tied the snake...
“I have no interest in retirement,” Leon Dash says from his office in Gregory Hall, on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign. At 72, Dash has, by all accounts, lived an exceptionally full, successful life— one that more than merits a comfortable retirement. Dash spent 30...
Do you bottle up your anger when you argue with your spouse, only to let it out in occasional outbursts of rage? Prepare to have debilitating cardiovascular problems when you’re older. Or do you shut down when confronted with conflict, “stonewalling” your significant other? Musculoskeletal ailments may...
Student loans are the financial equivalent of Marvel movies: insanely expensive, aggressively expanding and seemingly unavoidable. The class of 2016 will carry the highest average student loan debt ever, with 7 out of 10 seniors graduating in debt. And the average debt load is $37,172 — up from last...
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...
How the hell am I supposed to pack this thing? I thought to myself, staring at my freshly purchased fedora. I had no intention of keeping this accessory long-term. My plan when I bought the ridiculously overpriced, much-maligned hat earlier that day was to wear it for...
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...
