In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
Stop trying to make ‘digital blackface’ happen
Sweet Brown is wearing a tie-dyed tank top, a scarf knotted around her short dark hair. She’s talking to the camera like it’s someone she knows intimately, telling the story of her brush with death: “I said, oh lord Jesus, …
How Tumblr corrupted the New York Times
Self-reinvention narratives have always played well in America — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the origin story of the country itself. From the feel-good to the sinister, the Great Gatsbys to the Talented Mister Ripleys, there’s something enticing and titillating about the …
The Resistance Media’s double standards
It’s hard to say exactly when unbridled, gossipy speculation about the health of our political candidates became an accepted part of the American media landscape. It might have been November 2015, when Vanity Fair published an article entitled “Is Donald …
The problem with being hot
The late Rush Limbaugh once said that feminism was created to “allow ugly women access to society” — a comment all the crueller because it was true. A central tenet of feminism is that a woman’s social value should be …
The antidote to America’s race wars
The date 1619 does not appear in the introduction to African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer’s encyclopaedic, magisterial new book. But the controversial project that takes that date as its name — launched …
Is the media still stifling the lab-leak theory?
Last autumn, American intelligence agencies reported to the White House that they remain divided on whether the pandemic started naturally or was the result of a lab accident. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an …
Did the New York Times spy on its workers?
Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, is by all accounts a union man. In his recent essay on “The Power in Numbers”, he concluded with a rousing demand: the Government …