Emmeline Clein at The Nation:
A woman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It’s an apt metaphor. In mid-century America, housewives were expected to polish their own gilded cages without considering how their feelings of entrapment might be related to their imprisonment in suburban homes. But by the late 1960s, even advertisers recognized that women might find such lives a little upsetting after reading The Feminine Mystique.
The aforementioned woman is a model in a 1967 ad for a tranquilizer called Miltown. The ad acknowledged that the drug “cannot change her environment…but it can help relieve the anxiety” caused by her conditions. Ten years prior, Miltown had swept the market, selling over a billion units in the decade after Wallace Laboratories debuted it. In ads for Miltown, pharmaceutical copy suggested an incompatibility between liberatory social movements and surviving the suburbs might be to blame for a woman’s anxious distress. Nonetheless, they had a solution: A pill would go down more smoothly than a revolution.
P.E. Moskowitz deftly deconstructs this ad in a scathing examination of today’s psychopharmaceutical industrial complex in their third and newest book, Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs.
more here.
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“We are all Sally Mann now,” one might think, gazing at the social-media streams that 
I’m sure it’s my interest in knowing what’s normal as much as my interest in porn that led me, a few months ago, to pick up a copy of Porn, by Polly Barton. Subtitled “an oral history” and put out by the highbrow independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, Porn is billed on the back cover as a “thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.” It’s organized as a series of “chats” between the author and nineteen acquaintances, varied across age and gender and anonymized so that each subject is referred to with a number from one to nineteen. Barton is a translator who found herself surprised by the realization that she wanted to write about the ever-present but largely unspoken subject of porn, so much so that the idea kept her up at night. This preoccupation felt “deeply embarrassing” to her: “If only I was a porn connoisseur,” she writes regretfully. Her “predominant feeling towards porn,” she continues in the introduction,
Molly Moscatiello, age 7, started riding her bike to first grade last year. There’s a crosswalk with no crossing guard, “and I had to look both ways like five times,” she says, two grown-up teeth peeking through the gap in the front of her smile. Sometimes her parents’ friends would drive past and ask if Molly needed a ride, but she’d always wave them off. “I felt a little nervous at first,” she says. “But then after a while I felt comfortable by myself.” Soon, other kids began asking to ride their bikes to school. By the end of first grade, Molly was leading a small cohort of five or six, riding to school together in Little Silver, N.J.
The cover of “Man’s Best Friend” features a photo of Carpenter wearing heels and a black cocktail dress, on her hands and knees, before a faceless man who clutches a fistful of her hair. The image consciously hints at porn (the set includes beige wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy white drapes, as if Carpenter were crawling through a Motel 6) and sexual submission, particularly when paired with the album’s title. Reactions were swift and high-pitched. People tend to find the union of sex and violence—or sex and willing subjugation—either fun and titillating or gruesome and catastrophically sinful.
It is hard to find a philosopher who writes well. One can list the good stylists on one hand: 
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.
In 2025, 
Every generation thinks it’s witnessing humanity’s moral collapse. New York Times columnist 
“The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United States. In 1951, when I was ten years old, my father, Samuel Wallach, a New York City high school teacher, was suspended from his job for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into communism in the public schools. He was fired for insubordination two years later—one of some 350 teachers who were fired or resigned in those years.
During these first nine months
UFOs exist. On that we can all agree. The question is not whether they are but what they are.
Brakhage virtually invented and singularly dominated the characteristic genre of American avant-garde cinema: the crisis film, that lyric articulation of the moods and observations of the filmmaker, following a rhythmical association of images without a predetermined scenario or enacted drama. Since the early ’60s he handpainted on film so elaborately that he brought that way of filmmaking, at least as old as Len Lye’s work in the mid-’30s, to new profundities. It became the predominant process of his filmmaking in the ’90s. Perhaps a quarter of his oeuvre was made without using a camera.
I looked at my wife. Her eyes — soulful, brown, impossibly beautiful — met mine. I had looked into them thousands of times before, but in that moment, I wondered: Had I ever really seen them?
Neuroscientists from 22 labs joined forces in an unprecedented international partnership to produce a landmark achievement: a neural map that shows activity across the entire brain during decision-making.