When I began bookmarking every great article I read this year, I put the promise in my back pocket like every other New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made: easily forgotten and painlessly cast aside by mid-March. And as far as resolutions go, mine was a relatively achievable one. But deep into the year, as I compiled a dense thicket of articles in a folder on my browser’s toolbar, I found myself following the Twitter feeds of more and more writers and publications. I’ve bought more books this year than I ever have (still not that many books). I’ve shared dozens of articles with friends and peers, and found myself more aware of culture and trends than ever before. Part of living in the internet today is consuming information in a rabid, Miyazaki-like fashion. Let me regurgitate that information like a mother bird to you. Come along as I reflect on 2015’s funniest, wisest, most thoughtful, and best culture writing.
(In sorta-chronological order)
Inherent Vice and the Modern Audience’s Ambiguity Problem
by Kevin Lincoln
Increasingly, we’ve become a culture that insists on resolution and explanation from our stories. We need to know who did it as immediately as possible. We need to know how True Detective ends, even before we’re halfway through the goddamn season. We need to know if the science is right in Interstellar, and why the characters in Game of Thrones, a show set in a world that contains dragons, are so mean to each other. Ambiguity has become like the Postal Service: We tolerate it only when absolutely necessary. Less and less are we content to be told a story; more and more we want to tell that story ourselves, showing that we get it, we got it, we figured it out.
The Carver Mobb
by Ivan Solotaroff
In seconds, his body is convulsed in rage, the muscles of his torso, arms and back tightening, loosening, then tightening further with each screaming outburst — variously against his teammate’s inability to get A SINGLE FUCKING STOP in the second half, how nothing in his life ever works out. Time and again, it seems to end. But then it comes again, exactly the same as today’s midfield fight.
Anyone who doubts the fundamental difference between anger and rage should witness something like this. I’ve watched it for a month, lived in this city half a century, and have devoted much of my career to reporting its various inner-city manifestations. But feel I only now begin to truly get it.
The Invisible Woman: A Conversation With Björk
by Jessica Hopper
Pitchfork: In the first two songs on the record, you’re singing about wanting to find clarity. Does writing a song about something that has happened bring you clarity on the other end?
Björk: Yeah, I think so. When it works. I go for a lot of walks and I sing. That’s when you find an angle on things, where it makes sense for that particular moment. It’s more that feeling. In a way, I also rediscovered music, because [chokes up] — I’m sorry — it’s so miraculous what it can do to you; when you are in a really fucked situation, it’s the only thing that can save you. Nothing else will. And it does, it really does.
What Macho Man Randy Savage Meant to Me
by Jules Bentley
I knew kids who read superhero comics, but I never could get into it. Those characters were just drawings, not real like Macho Man. I could also see, even from earliest adolescence, that Superman and his ilk were on the side of the establishment: magical, underdressed cops enforcing a wholesome all-American status quo. I experienced that same status quo directly and daily as a crushing, isolating conformity. I hated it, and I hated anyone who pretended it was any good. Those comic book heroes reminded me of Hulk Hogan: super-powerful, super-pious.
Macho Man wasn’t like that. He was petty and paranoid, the 20th century version of some intemperate Greek God. He stewed in a constant simmer of tantrum, his twitching tics and rasping, bending vowels expressing those raw, “immature,” “unacceptable” impulses and whims that constantly fought (and generally lost to) fear and self-consciousness in the private ring of my psyche.
What’s Going On: Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, J. Cole, Kanye West, and the New Sound of Protest Music
by Vann R. Newkirk II
So we wait for whatever Kanye and other artists will provide this year as the theme song to accompany the beating hearts of the movements. The protests around the nation were sparked out of frustration about incidents of violence against black individuals, but the energy itself is enduring across different faces and times. Whether the protests be in Selma and Birmingham in the ’60s or Ferguson and New York today, the music also endures. Just listen up.
American Sniper is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize
by Matt Taibbi
No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.
But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children — Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.
Why I h8 online media
by Carles
It is all meaningless.
I participated in the cultural event (in person, on live television, on a streaming device). I returned home 2 find a page on the internet that shared the same experience as me. I still feel alone.
There is nothing there.
There are words, pictures, videos. There are buttons 2 share.
But I feel like I can’t be found.
I cannot be found on the internet.
I can no longer find myself on the internet.
The Disappeared
by Spencer Ackerman
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
The Elusive Creator of the Most Terrifying Video Games
by Brittany Vincent
It all seems a bit like a cruel joke to have such a burgeoning mind full of interesting takes on reality, the psyche, and the worlds we explore within video games to be so aloof and disconnected with the very realm that will have immortalized him long after he’s passed: the Internet.
All My Blogs Are Dead
by Carter Maness
We assume everything we publish online will be preserved. But websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache clears? As I found with that pitch at the end of 2014, my writing resume is now oddly incomplete and unverifiable.
A Walk Through Zion with Princess Nokia
by Nina Mashurova
As Destiny sits in her apartment explaining the inherent feminist messages of her new video, I get lost in thought connecting the dots between the Nokia battling with Agents in “Cybiko” and the Nokia dancing with children on “Young Girls”. I absentmindedly start saying that it’s like she’s gone from being Neo to being the Oracle.
Her eyes light up. “I am the Oracle! I’m both.”
The Oracle in the Matrix was an older woman of color who lived in the projects and took care of psychic children. “I knew a lot of people like that growing up,” says Destiny. “She’s clairvoyant, she took care of children, she took care of the people of Zion, and she was a machine. She was the most prophetic, most divine, most supernatural being in that movie, but she was also the most superficial. She didn’t exist. She was a program. And that’s how I feel sometimes.”
Unclimbable
by Eva Holland
I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a place that forces me to reach for comparisons from fiction: It’s “Lord of the Rings,” I tell people. It’s Mordor crossed with the Shire.
The Best of Keygen Music
by Fan Fiction
For those not familiar, a keygen, short for key generator, is a tiny piece of illegal software, usually bundled with a torrent download, that generates an unlock code to the full version of an application. Just click “activate” and your trial version of Photoshop is now the full suite. The best thing about these apps is the music that plays every time you open one. There are thousands of these things out there and all of the tracks in them are amazing, but until today, most of the artists and track titles have remained largely unknown, or unlooked-for.
The intros were each crack team’s signature, and as the scene grew, artists making these signatures started looking at “intros” as a new form of standalone audio and visual expression.
Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast
by Elizabeth Weil
One night in October 2012, while Cain was in bed — she likes to sleep 12 hours a night — the house phone rang. Cain’s mother, also named Mary, answered. A man claiming to be Alberto Salazar, the legendary runner and coach, was on the line. At first she thought the call was a prank. But then Salazar explained that he’d recently reviewed the video of her daughter’s Barcelona run. An obsessive about form, Salazar said that Cain’s lower-body mechanics were excellent, good enough to make her the best in the world, but that her upper body needed work. In particular, if she wanted to reach her potential, she needed to keep her left elbow closer to her body, swing it straight, front to back, instead of out and across her torso. He referred to the elbow as her “chicken wing.”
What It’s Like to Work at The Waffle House for 24 Hours Straight
by Andrew Knowlton
The next order is mine and I’m shaking. The Waffle House goal is to have every table in and out in 20 minutes. Ha! The order comes in, employing the “Pull, Drop, and Mark” system that every Waffle House uses. Here’s how it works: When an order is taken, the server writes it down on a pad, and then comes back to the grill and yells it out.
So how do grill operators remember these orders without a ticket? Well, using a chain-wide system, they “mark” each plate with a mayonnaise, ketchup, or any number of condiment packets. For a sausage omelet, say, you would grab a plate and place a horizontal grape jelly packet right side up at the three o’clock position. For a Texas Patty Melt, you place a right-side-up mayo pack in the center of the plate with two slices of buttered Texas toast and two slices of cheese. And hash browns? That involves putting a few shreds of potato on the plate with a bit of each topping requested. And that’s an easy order. The whole point of this system is that if a grill operator walks into any Waffle House, he or she should be able to jump right in. I was confused and still am.
I Played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out
by Timothy Faust
The opening notes to the fourth occurrence of “The Boys Are Back in Town” was met with an immediate shattering of glass, a roar of fuck-words, and the small but rapid egress of people whose ears were closed to the good news (the good news about the town, and the boys who were back in it). Two wild-eyed men, drunken and furious, descended upon the jukebox and lifted it away from the wall to get at the plug. When things had resettled, there was a line to queue up songs at the jukebox, which I joined.
“Are you fucking going to play ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ again?” asked a voice when I reached the jukebox.
“I absolutely, 100 percent, am not going to play ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ again,” I promised, punching the buttons to select “The Boys Are Back in Town,” which I had memorized.
From Teklife to the Next Life
by Meaghan Garvey
Their work ethic has been keen for years, but their mindset is sharper now that both Teklife’s legacy and Rashad’s rest with them. They all still feel his presence: “When I make music, I do it as if he was sitting here listening,” says Taye. “I do it with everything he taught me. He lives with us.” Rashad’s influence on Teklife’s second generation isn’t just musical; his example helped shape Earl and Taye into the driven, positive, and deeply loyal adults they have become. “My life would not be the same without him,” says Earl. “Rashad always put everybody before him. He was for everybody. As long as you were positive and living to your fullest potential, he was willing to help you out. We want to be that spirit that carries on his message.”
3 Inches From the Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told
by Zak Keefer
Hayward rebounded Zoubek’s miss, turned, weaved his way past Zoubek and, later, Singler — thanks to a crushing screen from Howard — and lofted a halfcourt heave 46 feet from the basket. If it dropped, Butler would win the title, 62–61.
It very nearly did. Hayward’s heave bounced off the glass, bounced off the inside of the rim, and fell off. “Oh! It almost went in! It almost went in!” Nantz shouted on the telecast. Stevens fell to his knees. Howard dropped to the court, covering his face in his hands. Hayward turned and clenched his fists.
A collective gasp of the 70,930 fans inside the stadium cut through the silence. Duke was college basketball’s national champion. Butler was not. It was later determined by ESPN’s SportsScience that if Hayward’s shot was three inches to the left, the ball would have banked off the backboard and fell in. It was that close. The Bulldogs came three inches from winning the national championship.
The Man Who Broke the Music Business
by Stephen Witt
From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music. He claims that he never smuggled the CDs himself. Instead, he tapped a network of low-paid temporary employees, offering cash or movies for leaked disks. The handoffs took place at gas stations and convenience stores far from the plant. Before long, Glover earned a promotion, which enabled him to schedule the shifts on the packaging line. If a prized release came through the plant, he had the power to ensure that his man was there.
The Second Most Famous Thing to Happen to Hiroshima
by Matt Goulding
A customer from the neighborhood came in one afternoon while Lopez was making salsa for a staff meal. He saw a pile of chopped jalapeños and asked Lopez to throw a few in with his okonomiyaki. Lopez tried to dissuade the man, told him that jalapeños are spicy and wouldn’t match well with the okonomiyaki, but the customer insisted. He loved it, and came back every day for weeks, ordering the same thing, until finally another customer saw the off-menu alteration and came along for the ride. Soon the spicy supplement became a Lopez staple, and he was forced to add it to the regular menu.
Today, the jalapeño okonomiyaki remains the most popular item at Lopez Okonomiyaki, much to the owner’s chagrin.
“Jalapeños don’t belong in okonomiyaki.”
On the Existential Beauty of Peanuts
by Kaleb Horton
But there’s also the Peanuts Charles Schulz created, the one that ran daily for half a century, from 1950 until January 3, 2000, just a month before Schulz died of cancer. We mostly know it superficially, as a series of iconic images — Charlie Brown with his head down, Snoopy perched on top of a doghouse, Linus clutching his baby blanket, Pigpen with a cloud of dirt behind him. But beyond those images is a melancholic masterpiece. The longest-running meditation on loneliness, defeat, and alienation ever in popular American art.
SELFIE: The Revolutionary Potential of Your Own Face, in Seven Chapters
by Rachel Syme
Shot One: Open on a woman snapping a picture of herself, by herself. Maybe she is sitting at an outdoor cafe, her phone held out in front of her like a gilded hand mirror, a looking glass linked to an Instagram account. Maybe she tilts her head one way and then another, smiling and smirking, pushing her hair around, defiantly staring into the lens, then coyly looking away. She takes one shot, then five, then 25. She flips through these images, appraising them, an editrix putting together the September issue of her face; she weighs each against the others, plays around with filters and lighting, and makes a final choice. She pushes send and it’s done. Her selfie is off to have adventures without her, to meet the gazes of strangers she will never know. She feels excited, maybe a little nervous. She has declared, in just a few clicks, that she deserves, in that moment, to be seen. The whole process takes less than five minutes.
Unfollow: How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs
by Adrian Chen
Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot — a band that C.G. had recommended — played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”
The Serial Swatter
by Jason Fagone
A Canadian Twitch streamer named Maple Ong got a call one night in January 2014, telling her to leave her house with her hands up, along with her panicked father and younger brother, so the police could search it for bombs that Obnoxious had told them were placed there. Allison Henderson, a 26-year-old artist and streamer who lived with two other streamers in Costa Mesa, Calif., received a phone call one night from a woman with the Police Department, asking her how many people were in her apartment and what she was wearing. Allison and her roommates had recently been DDoSed and harassed by Obnoxious. The policewoman told Allison to step outside with her hands above her head.
‘‘I held my breath and slowly opened the door to the sight of rifles pointed at me from every direction,’’ she says. ‘‘It was the most terrifying experience of my life.’’ When officers questioned her, she couldn’t make them understand. ‘‘They were completely lost on the idea of a stranger harassing us over the Internet,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s a feeling like you’re drowning, and the person doesn’t understand what water is.’’
Sea of Crises
by Brian Phillips
All that winter I had been forgetful. No one who knew me would have guessed that anything was wrong, because in fact nothing was wrong. It was only that things kept slipping my mind. Appointments, commitments, errands. My parents’ phone number. Sometimes, and for minutes at a time, what city I was in. There is a feeling that comes when you open a browser window on a computer and then realize you have lost all sense of what you meant to do with it; I felt that way looking out of real windows. Some slight but definitive shift in my brain had separated me from my own thoughts. The pattern had changed and I could no longer read it; the map had altered and I could no longer find my way.
There was a reason for this, but instead of confronting it I was evading it, I was refusing to name it to myself. I would come up to the point and then trail off in the middle of the sentence. I kept myself in the margins of a safe semi-oblivion, around whose edges things kept erasing themselves. Of course I would go to Tokyo, I said when I was asked to write about sumo wrestling. Inwardly, I was already there.
