Tag: younger self
The Lost Boys of Big Tech
The original “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was used to spread rumors and gossip about other girls (and some boys) at North Shore High School. Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, tells true stories about men (and some women) who ruled Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Swisher was a political reporter in Washington, but tuned into the dot-com revolution early and moved to California to cover it. As a handful of tech titans grew in fame and power, so
Why dream hampton Won’t Give Up on Hip-Hop
One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a
Vladimir Putin and the Parable of the ‘Cornered Rat’
Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones.
In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the
How Issa Rae Built the World of ‘Insecure’
Sitting in a New York City hotel room with a plastic flute full of prosecco and strappy black Manolo Blahnik heels resting near her bare feet, Issa Rae looks like the kind of woman who would have petrified an earlier avatar of herself. If you remember J, the endearingly cringe-inducing protagonist of Rae’s early-2010s YouTube series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, then you know she was a far cry from the woman who now has her face
Women and the Liberating Power of No
A few years ago, on the eve of my giving a commencement address at Emma Willard, a girls’ boarding school in upstate New York, the mother of one of the graduates approached me with a question:
“If you could go back to your younger self—say, six years after you’d graduated from high school—what would you ask?”
I thought about it for a second and then said, “I’m not so sure I’d ask my younger self anything, but here’s what I’d