Is it the end of an era, or am I just getting old?

Natalie Adler on the rise of rich-person minimalism in an era when so many people are hungry. And Planet Money's Greg Rosalsky reports on affirmative action for rich people, which remains firmly in place.

Pink is the oldest color, explains Kasha Patel. And Elvia Limón on being a Barbie girl in a first-gen immigrant world. 

“Keep honking, it’s empty!” Kari Paul reports on the group of activists stopping self-driving cars in San Francisco. 

Carrie Battan reports on what's going on inside the family business of Dr. Bronner's. 

"If 100 million years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have?" Peter Brannan asks if the anthropocene is really a new “epoch” of geological time... or were we always destined to be a blip?

And a great roundup of stuff from the writing fellows this week: Paige Curtis with a hike to remember (your favorite rom-com wishes it were this cute!). Vera Blossom diagrams a hot engine. And 2022 fellow Celia Mattison with the summer movie roundup I needed.

Mikki Halpin catalogs all the times artists and activists used Barbie to fuck shit up. Louise Bourgeois peels an orange. A peek inside the world's last internet cafes.

An iconic act of protest, a prescient commentary on which people really pose a danger to society, and a reminder that what goes down in history as brave is always vilified in the moment. "I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” Sinéad O'Connor said in 2021. “But it was very traumatizing.”

"She was owed so many apologies that she never got," writes Hanif Abdurraqib. "I’m glad we had her for a while. So glad she shared herself with us."

All I want to do is just sit here
And write it all down and rest for a while.

"This this THIS. I never knew I felt this about Barbie and baby dolls till I read this. Thank you." -Grace. It's funny because when I saw the Barbie movie I was like, "Oh, Greta Gerwig makes the very point I made in last week's newsletter within the first 5 seconds of this film." Clearly many of us feel this way!