Why Your Mom Uses Emojis All Wrong 🙃
Mark Helenowski/Mother Jones In the early 2010s, strange uses of language started cropping up all over the micro-blogging platform Tumblr. A Tumblr user might do ALL THE THINGS, or get major feels, or lose the ability to even. Somehow, everyone understood each other. One blog, All Things Linguistic, took the language of Tumblr users seriously.…
Michael Jang Offers a Fresh Look at a Retro California
It took 40 years for Michael Jang’s photography career to take off, and to tell you the truth, he’s thrilled. “This delayed gratification thing? It couldn’t be any better,” Jang says in the kitchen of his house, which is filled with framed prints for his first retrospective show. The prints of various sizes are neatly wrapped in…
This Lawyer Is Bringing the Internet’s Worst Men to Heel
Mother Jones illustration; Natan Dvir Listen up, assholes. Carrie Goldberg is coming for you. Since founding her law firm in 2014, the defiant, trash-talking New York lawyer has built a reputation for going after sexual predators from Harvey Weinstein to anonymous trolls and purveyors of nonconsensual pornography. In her new book Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos,…
What Will Be Left When We’re Gone? Bones, Plastic, Radioactive Waste, and Lots of Garbage.
Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Millions of years from now, what will be left of us? At the rate we’re going, nature might well have taken over. Moscow and Mumbai will be sand and gravel cast across the desert expanse; New…
No One Called the United States “America” Until It Became an Empire
Battle of Manila Bay, Philippines, May 1, 1898, the first major engagement of the Spanish–American War. Those are Spanish vessels on fire. Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Adapted from How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. America, as a shorthand for the United States, has a way of raising…
Why “Jaws” Was So Terrifying, According to the Guy Who Co-Wrote It
Zanuck/Entertainment Pictures/ZUMA When Steven Spielberg’s Jaws premiered on this date 44 years ago, on June 20, 1975, it was a booming success: In the first weekend, it grossed $7 million—adjusted for inflation, that’s a whopping $33 million. The film would go on to inspire a wealth of pop culture moments: a Saturday Night Live skit…