(Sub)Culture Features

In 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau appeared on the cover ofPeople magazine with her first child, Audrey. Bathed in warm light, with her blond hair softly curling and her brown eyes doleful, Letourneau could easily have been confused with the subject of a generic Sears portrait, if you didn’t read the …

Americans have a hard time sleeping — according to the National Sleep Foundation, nearly a third of U.S. adults have experienced insomnia. But sleeping pills can cause plenty of unsavory side effects, which is why so many people are turning to natural remedies. And over the past two decades, one …

On a frigid Saturday afternoon, the best-smelling place in America was Ellipse Park in Washington, D.C., where it was impossible to go one step in either direction without walking into a fragrant cloud of sweet-smelling vapor — though marketed to mimic everything from strawberries to cotton candy, it all came …

“Musicals can be very tricky,” Jeanine Tesori explains. “Because when you deliver something and you put a beautiful string section underneath it, it sways you. It sways you because of the physics of music, and the overtone series and the ways that music is embedded inside the science of being …

Andrea Bowers is an artist best known for her socially conscious art works and installations, much of which explores women’s issues — her work has touched on such topics as the Steubenville rape case and reproductive-rights activism in the era before Roe v. Wade. So it was somewhat surprising on …

“People think I’m a nasty piece of work,” Ralph Steadman claims. That’s because of how his satirically morbid illustrations brought Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo acid trips to life and captured the atrocities of the Nixon era, such as when he depicted the president’s face melting and rotting on the cover …

TikTok is the first buzzy app to make me feel really, truly old, which sucks for more reasons than the growing realizations that come with aging: TikTok is simply unavoidable now. If you’re on Twitter, you probably see the app’s Vine-like videos retweeted on your timeline at least once a …

The nation is going through a marijuana revolution, but officials throughout the federal government continue to live in the prohibitionist, anti-drug eras of ages past. But that’s no longer good enough for many lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives are increasing pressure on the Food …

Whether you’re stuck in weather-related traffic, waiting at an airport for a flight to decide to leave, or just holing up at home, winter is a great time for podcasts, since they provide an intimate, in-depth look at all sorts of subjects while you try to stay cozy. Here are …

“I’m not an animal. I’m not crazy. I’m just a normal individual,” Ted Bundy says in a snippet of an interview at the beginning of the new Netflix documentary series Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Of course, as one of the most notorious serial rapists and killers …