The $99 Hangover Cure
A hangover cure that actually worked sounded too good to be true and begged a rigorous investigation. Someone needed to get drunk—and that someone was me. I organized a team consisting of a photographer named Ryan, some of Ryan’s pals, and my high school friend Julia, who provided useful commentary: “This is much more fun than the time we mixed gin with Diet Sprite in your parents’ basement.”
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The first two months of my daughter’s life, I spent 28 hours a week breastfeeding her. I know this because I used an app to record her feedings—when they were, how long they took, when I needed to feed her again—because my sleep-deprived brain couldn’t retain the information on its own. I’d had a difficult delivery and spent most of those early days in bed. Sitting hurt too much, so I fed her lying down. Sometimes I slept. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I watched TV. Mostly, I just lay still. Each feed took about half an hour. Two hours later my daughter would wake up, cry, and I’d have to start the process over again. I’d lie there and watch the sun set and then rise, and wonder how anybody doing this could be expected to go back to work.
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Why are Americans Still Waiting for Paid Leave?
The Bikini-Body Cult of Kayla Itsines
Twelve minutes into the Sweat With Kayla boot camp, after the mandatory hug-the-stranger-next-to-you icebreaker but before the series of 30-second, full-body planks, an exasperated cry comes from somewhere in the sea of 4,000 women doing burpees on yoga mats: “This is soooooo hard!”
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A Visit to the Less Famous But Certainly Bigger World's Largest Ball of Twine
Two summers ago, my boyfriend Josh and I borrowed a Jeep from an overly trusting friend of his father and drove out west. From New York City, we traveled nine thousand miles across twenty-five states for a trip that would include my first attempt at camping, his first visit to California, and the invention of a new game best described as, “Turn on the country radio station and try to guess which societal woe will be lamented next.” (Alcoholism. Always pick alcoholism.)
On the third day of the road trip, about two hundred thirty miles into Kansas, we hit a small town called Cawker City, which claims to be home to about four hundred people; I suspect they were rounding up. Cawker City is also home to the World's Largest Ball of Twine. Well, one of them.
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One Hundred Days of 'No'
Jia Jiang wants to write for Bloomberg Businessweek. He has never written for a magazine and doesn’t have an idea for an article, but he still wants to see if we’ll give him a shot. After I tell him “no,” he drives to the University of Texas, Austin, where he plans to pester a professor into letting him lecture a class. In the past month, Jiang has asked a Southwest Airlines flight attendant if he could give the on-board safety announcement and a Domino’s employee if he could deliver pizzas, and he also urged an ice cream shop to invent a flavor just for him. He makes at least one preposterous demand every day, records a video of himself doing it, and posts it on a blog
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Harry Potter and the Angry Stamp Collectors
The Harry Potter stamps have caused a bit of a dustup among stamp traditionalists, who have found a number of transgressions in the series...The controversy, such as it is, isn’t really about whether Harry and Hermione should appear on a U.S. stamp, or even the process of stamp approval; critics worry that the venerable postal service is too enthusiastic in its embrace of mainstream pop culture as a way to bring in money.
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The Butler Didn't Do It: Hello Alfred and the Limits of the On-Demand Economy
The U.S. Postal Service seems to have structured its hours so that no matter what job you have, it’s always closed by the time you’re off for the night. Banks and dry cleaners: same thing. My work-appropriate skirts and sweaters pile up until all I’m left with in the morning is a pair of ripped jeans and the thought, Is there such a thing as business extra-casual? Life would be so much easier if someone would just clean my house and run my errands. But paying a person to be at my beck and call isn’t something that fits easily into a working-woman’s budget. It’s a shame, because I have a lot of becks.
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The Day the Music Died
When Elvis Presley died, 25,000 people gathered outside Graceland in the sweltering Memphis heat. John Lennon's murder drew millions of people to Central Park for a silent vigil. But when Buddy Holly's plane went down in an Iowa cornfield at a little past 1 a.m. on Feb. 3, 1959, there was nobody waiting for him among those swirling snowdrifts. The Lubbock, Texas singer never had a vigil. His home did not become a pilgrimage site and his family never held a memorial service for his fans. Yet with each passing decade, the myth of Buddy Holly has grown by substantial degrees.
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'Man, You Better Watch Out':
Why Women Marched
The sun hadn’t risen and already women were gathering in the streets. They carried cups of coffee with their homemade signs, making their way to Independence Avenue along the southern edge of the National Mall, where in four hours the Women’s March on Washington was set to start. Granola bars and bananas showed through clear plastic backpacks—the march organizers’ had asked people to bring as little as possible and to store it in something see-through so police would know what each bag contained. There wasn’t anyone there to enforce this rule but most of the women seemed to have obeyed it anyway. “I read the instructions. I made a check-list of what to do: clear bag, nothing hard or pointy attached to my poster, plenty of snacks, I followed it all,” a woman named Lindsay who’d traveled from Chicago said. “I have a full time job, I have kids at home, but this is important and I’m going to do this right.”
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