The Best Small-Talk Topic

By Gilad Edelman

The problem is that the people have nothing else to talk about, and once the topic of the evening’s precipitation is exhausted, the conversation will sputter out awkwardly. Perversely, the weather becomes the symbol of a limited conversational repertoire, when it was in fact the most interesting subject available.

The Bad Politics of Good Taste

By Lauren Kelly

The concept of “taste” is hollow and vain. Made up of rules, codes, and biases that reduce the complexity of preference and desire to the dichotomy of good or bad, the idea imposes a hierarchy of virtue based on consumer decisions and lifestyle choices.

It Is Impossible to Stop Comparing Yourself to Your Peers

By Melissa Dahl

They say comparison is the thief of joy, and this, as it turns out, is one cliché that has a raft of empirical evidence backing it up. But there is another truth about social comparison: It’s pretty much inevitable, so you may as well learn to use it to your advantage.

The Idea That Won't Go Away

By Anu

In a battle of new and old ideas, which one wins?

Notes on “Taste”

By Brie Wolfson

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.

Style as Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s Relationship with Fashion

By Sydney Russo

In Didion’s mind, self-respect begins when you are emancipated from the expectations of others and can live according to your own impulses, no longer attempting to play a role someone else has cast you in. It is an ethos that can easily be re-appropriated as a style manifesto: as much as Joan claimed to be missing the script, she knew her own character, and her undeviating sartorial habits serve as evidence.

The Hard Choices of Elizabeth Hardwick

By Maggy Doherty

Hardwick’s approach in these essays is clearly informed by her experiences: it is her independence that is unwanted, her feelings that have not been considered.

Why Can’t We Be Friends

By Brendan Mackie

“Don’t you see darling, that I am only one of millions of lonely girls. I belong to him who spends his Sundays in museums, who strolls in Central Park looking sadly at the lovers there. But I am more fortunate than any of these lovers, because I have you. Do you know that I am always thinking about you?” These parasocial relationships, Horton and Wohl argued, gave lonely, isolated, marginal people the belonging they couldn’t otherwise get from the society around them.

You support the creator because that’s just what friends do, and the creator responds in the language of friendship — by answering your questions, saying your name on the stream, sending you postcards, letting you pat them on their head.