Tag: young women
The Angst Behind China’s ‘Lying Flat’ Youth
On Halloween in 2022, outside a party the police had just disbanded in Beijing’s warehouse district, I saw a 20-something woman in a sparkly spandex suit and bunny ears run into the road. “Freedom, not testing!” she shouted. “Reform, not revolution! Votes, not dictators! Citizens, not slaves!”
Those were familiar words at Tsinghua University, where I was studying for a master’s degree. From a bridge near campus, someone had hung a banner emblazoned with the slogans. The banner’s
The Zeitgeist of Doom – The Atlantic
Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I’m a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest. But then a more individualistic culture took over. The University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Veroff and his colleagues compared national surveys conducted in 1957 and 1976 and found a significant shift in people’s self-definition: A communal, “socially integrated” mindset was being replaced with a “personal or individuated” mindset. The right-wing
Parties, Pills, and Paintings at Miami Art Week
“Miami,” in the art world, is short for Miami Art Week, which is short for a week-long bacchanal of eye candy, nose candy, parties, and pills held in the name of shopping for art. The first week of December marks the kickoff to Miami, which features two or maybe three dozen different art fairs, the most prestigious of them being Art Basel Miami Beach, an import from Switzerland that, if you’re in the know, is simply called “the main
Barbie Understands Mother-Daughter Relationships – The Atlantic
When I was a little girl, I played with Barbie for the most basic reason you can imagine: She was so pretty. The cute outfits, the shiny blond hair, and all the fun she would have going around, looking like that. When I went to see the Barbie movie years later, as a grown woman, I had no doubt that the film was going to tackle the obvious issues related to how Barbie is seen: the impact that her
The End of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Dominance
The U.S. Women’s National Team suffers by comparison to its old glories. At the previous World Cup, in 2019, it channeled the best of the American character: magnetic self-confidence that verged on arrogance, individualism that flamboyantly flouted archaic norms. In the press, players jawboned about the president of the United States as they waged war against their own employer in the name of equal pay. On the pitch, they were a hegemonic power: adventurous, righteous, justifiably certain of their destiny.
Greta Gerwig’s Lessons From Barbie Land
This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.
As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.
But the world cares very much about the movie he’s
The Conspiracy Theory That Burned a Convent Down
The riot, when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somerville. The convent, many had become convinced, was a den of sexual iniquity, where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control to exert power over young women and force them into
What to Read When You Want to Travel
Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that—spoiler alert!—he dies at the end. But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through
We Still Need Judy Blume
Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body.
I had just returned from visiting the author in Key West when I noticed a line of small, bright-red bites running up my right leg. I was certain it was bedbugs—and terrified that I’d given them to Blume, whose couch I had been sitting on a few days earlier.
Why This Democratic Strategist Walked Away
After working for three decades as an operative in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, Simon Rosenberg in 2022 became an overnight sensation. While most of the media was breathlessly predicting sweeping Republican gains in the midterm election (“Red Tsunami Watch,” Axios blared in a late-October headline), Rosenberg was the most visible public skeptic of the GOP-surge scenario.
For months, in a series of interviews, blog posts, and tweet streams, Rosenberg challenged the predictions of Democratic doom and highlighted