This week, the Central Intelligence Agency unveiled a new design for its website, CIA.gov, which wouldn’t have been news if the site had stuck to the formal signifiers of government authority: dense bureaucratic text, link directories, declarative headers, nothing too fancy. Instead, CIA.gov is set against a stark black background, offset by dots and lines…
We tried to soldier on but struggled. One afternoon, our good friends Kristen and Phil visited us in our backyard; for the first time, they understood the gravity of what we were dealing with. Not long after, they invited us to their place in Oakland for an outdoor dinner, but “their place” requires some explanation.…
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton With each new year comes an aura of possibility and reinvention. That spirit is at the very heart of the new Louis Vuitton x Urs Fischer collection, which fittingly launched on New Year’s Day. The capsule’s launch marries the Swiss contemporary artist’s vision with Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram logo for an…
We might not be experiencing the pain of a yellow mustard spill at a Mets game or boozy date nights involving Cabernet, but quarantine stains hit differently. Our first world problems seem magnified in lockdown. Something as small as spilled coffee on your favorite sweats to kitchen mishaps from a TikTok recipe can reveal just…
They came dressed for chaos. They came in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and…
I went to pick up my child from a school activity. (The kids are masked and grouped in small pods.) While waiting, my friend approached my car. She was obviously tipsy; even my younger child noticed how oddly she spoke and acted. I know she has a history of problem drinking. She’s also going through…
There are some songs that have lyrics so saturating of our psyche that they seem almost innate; that have crowds raising their drinks and bellowing along to the chorus in a dive bar at 2 a.m. … well, maybe not that, at least not now. But what if that song that seems to be playing…
Is there room in your mind for unuseful details? Or, would you make some, despite long odds the material could one day prove practicable? For those who find comfort in stockpiling answers to unasked questions, an invitation: Once a month, most months, there happens a happening that rewards compulsive curiosity. For a few hours in…
Oh, the stains. The staaaains! It’s the stains that truly obsess Drew Barrymore. “I’m a stan for stains,” she said on a recent episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” her syndicated talk show that premiered nationally in mid-September. Not that she knew what a “stan”— a portmanteau of ‘“stalker” and “fan” — actually was, which…
I don’t really remember when I pulled the black Everlane pants out of the drawer and onto my body. Was it spring, after the lockdown started and we were still doing videoconference happy hours for fun? Or the summer, when the rhythms of remote work seemed to settle in? Or the fall, when I began…