Philippa Snow
NEARLY EVERY MILLENNIAL WOMAN I KNOW carries with her a bone-deep knowledge of the same frightening folktale: a girl-child, blonde and beautiful, is born in Nowhere, USA, and becomes public property by virtue of her talent. She turns sixteen, and as the clock strikes midnight a transmogrification occurs, turning her into a plastic thing, an […] 
TAKE IT FROM ME—IT TAKES GUTS to commit serious analysis of the Kardashians to the page. In a decade-plus of working full-time as a critic, I have mercifully not received much hate mail, except in the wake of an essay I once published about Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which drove one man in particular […] 
TO DATE, I HAVE SEEN EVERY SEASON of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, a dating series in which attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people spend ten days speaking to other attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people through a wall, in the hopes that their inability to see each other will allow them to develop “real” feelings. These “real” […] 
PICTURE, IF YOU WILL, Joan Didion sitting on the floor of a Los Angeles recording studio in 1968, gazing up at Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band she went on to describe as “apocalyptic missionaries of sex.” If our patron saint of Californian disenchantment ever appeared starstruck, even girlish, it was surely here, in […] 
ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT BREAKUPS—aside, obviously, from the heartbreak and the acrimony, the division of belongings, and the general sense of loss—is their ability to make even nominally normal people behave like abnormal people, by which I mean writers. Few other situations lend themselves quite so definitively to casting ourselves in the lead role in our own personal drama. Minor coincidences become dazzling signs and wonders, or dark omens; lovelorn anecdotes are streamlined in the telling, edited and punched up as if we were not merely recounting them to our uninterested friends, but preparing them for future publication.