The most lurid corner of the Internet is not a new dating app or a fetish site. It’s a column in which anonymous young professional women document every penny they earn and spend in a week — By Carrie Battan The most lurid corner of the Internet is not a new dating app or a fetish site. It’s not an alt-right forum or a bitcoin marketplace, nor is it some channel of the deep Web where novel, illicit substances are heavily trafficked. It is Money Diaries, a…

My dad often told us that he assumed that he would have sons, but he ended up with girls. He eventually adjusted. As his firstborn, I became his mission. — By Robin Wright As my sister, Jana, tells it, my father and I had one long conversation that spanned thirty-four years. “From the time I remember, you and dad were always talking — about the world, about sports, about everything,” she told me recently. My dad often told us that…

I wonder how far along the scale of moral degeneration Zweig would judge America to be in its current state — By George Prochnik The Austrian émigré writer Stefan Zweig composed the first draft of his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” in a feverish rapture during the summer of 1941, as headlines gave every indication that civilization was being swallowed in darkness. Zweig’s beloved France had fallen to the Nazis the…

She was fooled by a group of expert criminals. The rest of us were fooled by her. — By David Owen The voice mail was from my mother’s longtime stockbroker, in the private-client department at Charles Schwab. “We’ve had some requests for large cash withdrawals from her account,” she said, and asked me to call her back. “We’re afraid that maybe someone has gotten to her. She requested…

Why assessing the state of the world is harder than it sounds. — By Joshua Rothman Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at CUNY; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had…

By Jia Tolentino Lately, the air has been crackling with financial resentment. Tweets and articles about money — about, say, how Kylie Jenner is a self-made billionaire, or how two rich college graduates chose their expensive apartment in Kips Bay, or how one young woman lives in New York on…

By Katy Waldman In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were…

What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth. — By Alan Burdick On the last Sunday afternoon in March, Mike Hughes, a sixty-two-year-old limousine driver from Apple Valley, California, successfully launched himself above the Mojave Desert in a homemade steam-powered rocket. He’d been trying for years, in one way or another. In 2002, Hughes set a Guinness World Record…

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy. — By Jia Tolentino Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To…