(Sub)Culture Features

The writer Eva Holland had a way of announcing she was moving toward full freakout mode while out climbing and hiking with her friends. She would mutter, “I’m not having fun anymore.” This might be followed by tears, anxious breathing, and, sometimes, freezing in place, which happened during a rock …

Ta-nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations — and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer, …

This story was originally published October 30th, 2008, in RS 1064. He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and house-wife-ish. He always wore his hair long. …

The sudden jail-cell death of the sex-offender socialite Jeffrey Epstein in federal custody has left the country baffled. How could such a high profile prisoner, who’d already allegedly attempted to kill himself, be left unattended and in position to cause himself harm? “Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must …

The trial of accused cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera inched toward the finish line Tuesday morning as the defense team rested its case after calling a single witness to testify. In a lightning round of questioning that clocked in at less than half an hour, defense attorney Jeffrey …

The hardest-working decade of 2018? That’s easy: the Nineties. The whole concept of the Nineties continues to haunt the pop imagination, epitomizing everything our sorry excuse for a decade fails to be. Let’s face it, the “teens” never became a thing, just like the “zeroes” didn’t. So as we head …

The midterm election results are in, and in addition to winning control of the House of Representatives, Democratic candidates managed to unseat Republican incumbents in other key positions — including “the top two elected officials most determined to keep [Steven Avery] and [Brendan Dassey] convicted.” That’s how defense attorney Jerry …

On Monday, Facebook booted alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pulling four of his pages from the social networking website for “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims, and immigrants.” The Jones ban coincides with similar efforts from YouTube, Spotify and iTunes, and follows Facebook’s …

Dr. Nick Spirtos isn’t sold on pot. He’s an oncologist at the Women’s Cancer Center of Nevada in Las Vegas, and he’s never used it, even though when he was growing up in Southern California in the Sixties and Seventies, everyone else was. He’s not convinced about the science of …

I’ve never been great at smoking weed. While some lucky smokers can come home, spark up a fatty and enjoy the benefits of ancient plant medicine, there’s always a chance I’ll end up lying awake all night, heart pounding, too out of it to even follow an episode of Bob’s …