Megan Garber
When Beauty Is a Troll
The peppy mixed messaging of I Feel Pretty is only the latest reminder: American culture doesn’t fully know what it’s talking about when it talks about attractiveness.
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Jacob Yakob / LD Entertainment For the Love of Dogs
Dog Days is a mediocre schlockfest that, despite and because of its saccharine predictability, is a very good boy.
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Jae C. Hong / AP And Then No One on the CBS Earnings Call Asked Les Moonves About Harassment
Americans have been conditioned to draw dangerous lines: money on the one side, morality on the other.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters / Katie Martin / ... The Lasting Trauma of Alex Jones’s Lies
The systems that have for so long helped to enforce the notion of collective truth in America are no longer sufficient: Deception is everywhere. And it is dangerous.
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Alan Schein / Getty The Dangerous Insufficiency of ‘No Means No’
Again and again, #MeToo stories have involved men who are skilled at respecting the letter of the law—and much worse at respecting the spirit.
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Dennis Van Tine / STAR MAX / IPx ... Les Moonves and the Familiarity Fallacy
The CBS chief’s associates have been offering a common defense: that the man they know simply wouldn’t do the things he is alleged to have done.
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Julie Jacobson / AP Roseanne, Hannity, and the One Joke That Reveals So Much
Appearing on Fox News on Thursday, Barr offered a non-apology to Valerie Jarrett. And then she mocked Jarrett’s haircut.
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FabrikaSimf / Shutterstock In the Land of Willful Amnesia
Sean Spicer lied with impunity. The White House applies revisionism to even the most recent of histories. Americans are constantly being asked—and constantly being primed—to forget.
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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Chip Somodevilla / ... The World Burns. Sarah Sanders Says This Is Fine.
The White House press secretary has set a new precedent: Partisanship over patriotism. Victory over truth.
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George Rinhart / Getty The Problem With Happy Endings
From tidy stories of reunited migrant families to #PlaneBae, Americans’ bias toward optimism is a wonderful thing—until it’s not.
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Leah Millis / Reuters Brett Kavanaugh, Jim Jordan, and the Fog of the Partisan
It's a slippery slope when weighty matters get dissolved into claims of bias and fakery.
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Lucas Jackson When the White House Is a Safe Space
The elevation of ousted Fox News executive Bill Shine to the highest workplace in the land is another reminder: #MeToo backlash will happen compromise by compromise, shrug by shrug.
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Rangizzz / Shutterstock Two Strangers Met on a Plane—and the Internet Ruined It
Nothing in American culture—not even delight, not even coincidence, not even love—is safe from the gravitational forces of commodification.
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Brendan McDermid / Reuters Is #MeToo Too Big?
Tarana Burke, the movement’s founder, wants it to return to its original—and specific—purpose: to serve as a counter to sexual violence.
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Reuters The Self-Defeating Ways Americans Talk About Feminism
#MeToo is much more than women fighting among themselves.
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Mana Mohpayak / Shutterstock To Be a Good Citizen, First Pay Attention
Yes, voting; yes, speaking; yes, showing up; full participation in the American democracy of the moment, however, demands an even more basic activity.
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Wikimedia Commons What High Heels Can Teach About Gendered ‘Truths’
A reminder that the quintessential piece of women’s footwear—a symbol of delicacy, of danger, of beauty—used to be worn by men
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Andrew Harnik / AP Schrödinger’s Coat
The 20th century witnessed the rise of the media event. The 21st, with its tan suits and swatted hands and flippant Zara outerwear, is bringing a new spin to the old idea.
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ProPublica How to Look Away
A corollary to a politics of destabilized truth is a politics of destabilized empathy.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters The Humans of The New York Times
The documentary series The Fourth Estate tries to humanize the journalists who report the news. It can’t help but fall into a trap.
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Mark Makela / Reuters Miss America 2.0: The Inner Beauty Pageant?
The competition is getting a #MeToo-era makeover. But even if the bikini tops are on their way out, the biases will remain.
