Suburbs Aren’t Only Conformist, White-Bread Clichés. They’ve Also Been Radical, Green, and Visionary.
Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty The typical suburb as it is stereotyped in the popular imagination is white, wealthy, and conformist. The Monkees’ 1967 song “Pleasant Valley Sunday” captured the cliché by describing a place with “rows of houses that are all the same and no one seems to care,” where there’s a TV in…
Ocean Vuong Wrote One of the Summer’s Most Anticipated Books. He Doesn’t Care If It “Matters to Whiteness.”
Tom Hines Ocean Vuong’s first act of writing, as he describes it, was an act of preservation. When his grandmother died in 2008, he felt a “sudden panic.” “I’m the only one that can write in the family,” he tells me, “so if I don’t write down her stories, they’ll be gone.” Vuong began penning…
Conspiracy Theories Have Been Around Forever. In a New Book, Anna Merlan Explains Why They’re Getting More Powerful.
David Reinert holds up a large “Q” sign while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump on August 2, 2018 at a rally Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Rick Loomis/Getty Images In many ways, this moment we’re in feels like the age of the conspiracy theory—one in which “wellness” schemes are the grift that keeps…
A Death, a Life, and a Border Wall
The border wall between the USA and Mexico in Arizona.Getty Images In the fall of 1993, Aaron Bobrow-Strain arrived in Tucson, Arizona, near the jagged ridge of the United States’ southern border. Dominating the news was debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, which would be passed by the House that November. As Bobrow-Strain settled…
Up Close and Personal with San Francisco’s Original Punks
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Long before it became a playground for budding millionaires, San Francisco was a city filled with freaks. Its punk scene, like a lot of early punk scenes, drew art students, outcasts, weirdos, and plenty of people just looking for a new kind of kick. Ruby…
A Photographer Reveals How a Shrinking African Landscape Leaves Little Room for Animals to Survive
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In Nick Brandt’s new book, This Empty World (Thames & Hudson), he explores the relationship between animals and humans that increasingly find themselves in one another’s way. “There is a very finite amount of space,” Brandt tells Mother Jones. “There isn’t room for both humans and…