Browse Topics

Getting Dressed

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

The Wall of Death

The Wall of Death is a rare piece of Americana, a vintage live-action show featuring a silo-shaped wooden cylinder thirty feet in diameter. Inside this motordrome, daredevils on motorcycles ride a fourteen-foot wall.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Red Desert

Sometimes I think of my early years of living in the city, that watery phase of life when you don’t plan beyond the next week, or even the next day, and every new connection is imbued with promise.

Long Shadows

Shaul Magid on the Evolution of Zionism and Israel

Hertog: How do we disentangle anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?

Magid: I certainly don’t think that anti-Semitism is the only reason people are out in the streets protesting the war in Gaza. You just have to look at the pictures of the utter devastation in Gaza to see what they are protesting against. They are protesting against the systematic destruction of an entire society, and with TikTok videos—posted by Gazans and Israeli soldiers—we are all watching it in real time. Media censorship no longer works in our era of social media. I don’t think Israel quite understands that. Anti-Semitism exists in some of these protests, for sure, but it’s not the primary impetus. If that was the case, why weren’t there campus protests against Israel for decades? You have to make a distinction between saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” or, “All Jews are implicated in this Zionist genocide,” which is clearly anti-Semitic, and saying, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and murdering children.” We can agree or disagree about what constitutes genocide, but opposition to what’s happening is not anti-Semitic. It has a moral justification. In my view, saying it is all anti-Semitism is just using anti-Semitism as an excuse for destroying a society. Yes, Israel had a right and a duty to respond to a horrendous, murderous act. But destroying a society in response is, in my view, a horrific choice we Jews will live with for many years.

Sunbeams

The worship of Opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.

Harriet Martineau

Complexion

A prominent birthmark, an elaborate skin-care regimen, a secret ancestry

Before Freedom

I took these photographs over the past three years across historic Palestine—in Jerusalem, Jericho, Haifa, Hebron, and Bethlehem—because I want to show folks what life looks like in a place so often talked about but rarely truly seen. The Israeli settler-colonial narrative, which is embedded in American discourse, attempts to erase and dehumanize Palestinian identity. My photography works in opposition to that force of erasure by creating a contemporary representation of the Palestinian people—one that embodies an active ethic of self-determination.

Under Construction

Richard Reeves on Rebuilding Masculinity

McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?

Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.

Sunbeams

How we talk about masculinity might be just as important, if not more so, than what we say. The very idea that there is a strict set of rules needs to be chucked away. The future of masculinity is a plethora of masculinities.

Grayson Perry