Our waitress crouched down to eye level and said, "Hey, bitches," then, earnestly, perhaps less joyfully than she might have earlier in her shift: "Are you thirsty bitches?" She said it with a sense of duty. We were at a restaurant called Bacon Bitch, and this is what is done there. Bacon Bitch had come up in a Google search for "brunch nearby" on a Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach, and when I'm presented with an option that sounds like a waking nightmare, I am powerless to pass it up. So we went and ordered the Bloody Marys with the hash brown and the fried egg on top, because we were both thirsty and curious bitches. You can picture the place, so I don't need to tell you there was a lime-green neon sign that read "Bitch don't kill my vibe" in cursive. You are already seeing the waitresses' tight uniforms and hearing the innumerable bachelorette parties that surrounded us. You have a completely accurate mental picture of the mimosa-drunk 21st-birthday boy tottering toward the bathroom in knockoff Balenciaga slides. It was Disneyland, except instead of Mickey Mouse, it was just the word bitch. I loved it, because it was very stupid, and for that reason, it felt very current. It was a piping-hot snapshot of our culture at this moment, so awash in sex- adjacent semi-salaciousness it came back around to being wholesome. Even polite. When our waitress jostled our table as she scooched past, she whispered with absolute sincerity, "Pardon me, bitch." It was the very picture, run through a filter and posted on Instagram, of the Sexual Recession. |
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| The Last Train Stop Before Heading to Ukraine's War |
On the eastern front of Ukraine, Kramatorsk is where the rail line ends and the frontline begins. Though the troops' forward line is twelve miles away, the city lies within range of enemy artillery, which Russian forces remind its citizens of daily. In April 2022, at the Kramataorsk rail station, Russia carried out one of its worst attacks on Ukrainian civilians, killing 60 and wounded over 120. Today, the station bears no sign of the tragedy that unfolded here just over a year ago; it has once more become a site of constant turnover, farewells, returns, reunions, feelings of hope and desperation. For the soldiers returning from Bakhmut, which has seen the war's most bitter fighting, little more needs to be said than its name. Once home to a population of 71,000, the city has been decimated, the site of an estimated 100,000 casualties between Ukrainian and Russian forces, and is now in the hands of the invaders. Theirs, however, was a Pyrrhic victory; the battle over Bakhmut is ongoing and remains a struggle of strategic significance. |
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How The Bear Became High-Key Fashion Television |
Carmen Berzatto spends the first episode of The Bear completely miserable and deeply in debt. He's just inherited the restaurant that his brother left to him before killing himself, and with the restaurant comes hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills and loans to pay back, and not a single helpful tip from his brother on where to find the money to save his mess of a sandwich shop. So, Carmy does what anyone in his situation would do—he goes home, opens his oven, and retrieves a few pairs of the extremely rare, vintage pieces of denim he's storing there. (There are even more in his closet—the oven is just where the overflow stock goes.) Then, he sets up a shady parking-lot meeting and sells them. Ten minutes into the hit FX show, we see Carmy's first foray within the world of menswear, and certainly not his last. After The Bear premiered in 2022, all anyone could talk about was the show's fashion—and for a show about the art of making and serving food, that's kind of a big deal. The Bear isn't Emily In Paris or Sex and the City, where the costume design is a wildly in-your-face spectacle every time the scene changes. It isn't even Succession, where, for the last few seasons, catching moments of stealth wealth and unbranded luxury goods turned into a Sunday night sport. It's a show about family and trauma and chefs and food and forgiveness, and among it all, fashion is the main character, the common denominator that threads it all together. |
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Five Fits With: Street Style Photographer Tyler Joe |
When you're out shooting street style in this current climate, you'll see a dizzying number of photographers, and it can isolate you. That said, a few seasons back, getting into photographing street style again after Covid lockdowns, I met a few guys while catching up with fellow photographer Tommy Ton. One of them was this week's subject, Tyler Joe. I was curious to know more about this guy absolutely brimming with energy, running around in the streets exuberantly filming himself and subjects alike. He had a particular joy for the moment which was uplifting for me, too—call it chronic, infectious positivity. Last season, after chatting for a while between shows and sharing some dim sum at Tim Ho Wan, I knew I would soon feature him for this column. We finally linked up, so below Tyler and I discuss his originals intentions for taking photographs, finding a love of fashion through rap and sneaker culture, the effect photographing street style has had on his personal style, and plenty more. |
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All the News That's Fit to Stink: The End of an Era at The New York Times Sports Desk |
The announcement this week that The New York Times will no longer have a sports department comes as the kind of shock you get when you turn a corner and a longtime store or restaurant or building is gone; even if you haven't been there in years, it takes a moment to wrap your head around a world without it. I grew up a sports fan in a New York Times household. In the '70s and '80s this meant waiting days for box scores to appear. Everything about the sports section reinforced the idea that sports really wasn't that important in relation to the rest of the paper, or the world. I always got the sense that this was grown-ups writing about sports for grown-ups. A serious and un-fun paper with no comics or pulp, it seemed fitting to me that they had a columnist named Ira. The Times never stopped making sense. And it was this rational, calm approach that I later appreciated when fandom meant raised voices, slammed doors, and tears (being a Knicks and a Jets fan will do it to you). While I came to adore the juiciness of the tabloids with their bold headlines, gossip, fun, and viciousness, I developed a new appreciation for the Times. Being a red-ass, I found the evenness of a Times game report soothing. |
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The Rise of Tech Worker Fiction |
After years of jubilant hiring sprees, luxurious benefits, and florid rhetoric about the value of the people behind the curtain of innovation, the tech industry spent the last eighteen months laying off more than 350,000 of its workers—with more layoffs yet to come. From the outside, this vibe shift may seem abrupt, but workers on the inside have been watching a slow souring of the once outrageous promises the industry offered—both to consumers and to its employees. As internal pushback and unionization have snowballed, tech workers are waking up to the recognition that despite a white collar costume, tech labor is still labor, only at scale. And in the time-honored tradition of American labor, they're writing about it. In the last two years, novels from the perspective of tech workers have been popping up like app notifications, many written by former and even current employees. More subtle and internal than the tales of moustache-twirling (or turtleneck-wearing) founders appearing in journalistic profiles and documentaries, these narratives detail the personal crises of individuals clinging to paychecks and praise from their employers while struggling to square the promise of their work with the nagging truth of it. These stories, while fictional, ask a very real question about technology and labor today, against a backdrop of economic precarity and social isolation: how many of our values can we sacrifice for a shot at a secure life? In these novels, the conclusion is dramatically clear: to escape their untenable binds, protagonists launch themselves out of the industry, into parenthood, and across alternate dimensions. |
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