Jia Tolentino

A collection of articles about 26 from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth reporting, commentary, and analysis.

What Weiner had described was the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, or CAURD. It’s the flagship program of the Office of Cannabis Management (O.C.M.), the agency created, in 2021, to oversee the legalization of marijuana in New York. The state’s cannabis restrictions had been loosening for almost a decade, but that year the government passed a law that would have seemed unthinkable just a short while before. The governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, had been pushed left on the issue…

Fox mainly remembers her life in the registers of beauty and violence. Born in Italy, she spends early childhood with her grandfather, who makes zabaglione with eggs and sugar; she loves the emergency room and “the warm, calming sensation of knowing that I’m going to be taken care of.” When she visits New York, she sleeps in squats and in houses under renovation by her father, a contractor, but when she moves there, at age six, she has her own room with clouds painted on the ceiling. Physical ab…

How Does Extreme Heat Affect the Body? Download a transcript. During the hottest summer in history, The New Yorker’s Dhruv Khullar undergoes testing in a specialized chamber where researchers monitor the effects of heat on the body. The Origins of “Braiding Sweetgrass” Download a transcript. Parul Sehgal visits Robin Wall Kimmerer, who set out to bridge the gap between Western science and Indigenous teaching—and created a surprise best-seller and literary phenomenon. The New Yorker Radio Hour…

The “Sex and the City” writer on being ambitious, getting older, and making it in New York.

Recently, I spent a few months absorbing the new minimalist gospel, beginning with Marie Kondo, the celebrity decluttering guru, whose book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” has sold more than ten million copies, and whose stance can seem twee but is rooted in Shinto tradition: having fewer possessions allows us to care for those possessions as if they had souls. I also turned to Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who call themselves the Minimalists and, under that name, run a blog…

There is a pathos, and an odd sort of magic, in élite competitive cheerleading that has something to do with its insularity. Instagram has connected the cheerleading community in a new way—Gabi Butler, a principal character on “Cheer” and an early social-media cheer star, has more than eight hundred thousand followers—but the outside world still mostly thinks of cheerleading as sideline entertainment. Its growth as a true competitive sport has been so widely ignored that, in order to watch the N…

Four years later, Wurtzel published one of the best things she ever wrote, an essay for New York magazine about what she termed her “one-night stand of a life.” “I am proud that I have never so much as kissed a man for any reason besides absolute desire,” she wrote, “and I am more pleased that I only write what I feel like and it has been lucrative since I got out of college in 1989.” “Prozac Nation,” her blockbuster memoir from 1994, had bought her freedom, and she had “spent that freedom carel…

Eliot was given the nickname Possum by Ezra Pound, who got it from “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris’s compilation of plantation folktales, which was published in 1880. Eliot called Pound “Brer Rabbit,” in turn—the two men wrote to each other in black dialect for fun. (Eliot signed one postcard to Pound with the name “Tar Baby.”) Eliot had grown up in St. Louis, a city that sustained a thriving black theatre scene and also regularly hosted minstrel shows. (Pound was from Idaho.) In his early t…

Big Thief was formed in Brooklyn, but none of its members lives there. They live mostly on the road, touring for up to ten months at a time. Onstage, they move like an organism without a center, as if they’ve got in-ear microphones that allow them to hear one another thinking. They wear T-shirts and worn denim, and they give off a day-three-of-a-camping-trip vibe, playing folkish indie rock that sounds like something you’d chance upon while you had no cell service. Big Thief still has a small fo…

Chu notes that the world is becoming more cognitively estranging. “The case could be made that everyday reality for people all over the world has grown less and less concretely accessible over the past several centuries and will continue to evolve in that direction,” she writes. “Financial derivatives are more cognitively estranging than pennies. Global climate change is more cognitively estranging than yesterday’s local weather.” If you’re on board an eighteen-hour flight from Singapore to New…

Since then, “cursed” has become central in the online vernacular, and cursed content has gone from novel to mundane. There is a flourishing subreddit called “Cursed Memes,” which is not for the fainthearted: the least disturbing image I’ve seen there featured a golden retriever smiling with a full set of human teeth. On Instagram, there’s an abundance of cursed accounts: Cursed and Blessed Birds (a parakeet clamped between a set of barbecue tongs), Cursed Neoliberal Images (a Whole Foods sign sa…

The recent hit film, and the Usher song it features, helped me realize how many people have begun to remember the brief period just before the recession: with an atmosphere of glossy exultation that now conjures the beginning of the end.

When “The Custom of the Country” begins, Undine is a desperate newcomer to New York, two years sprung from the fictional town of Apex. A string of abortive attempts at romance and sophistication have landed her, and her parents—nineteenth-century A.T.M.s, who fearfully attempt to tranquilize their beastly daughter with diversion and finery—at a hotel called the Stentorian, in what they call the “Looey suites.” This is the fanciest setting to which their unconnected souls can lay claim. Undine an…

Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood’s dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness. The current President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and the Vice-President is a man who, as governor of Indiana, signed…

When the writer’s shocking account of being attacked by Donald Trump appeared, there was an immediate unspoken sense that it would only tell us what we already knew.

If you have the means, your dog can live the life style of a well-heeled sophisticate.

The show offers a vision of magazine journalism that mixes the fanciful with on-the-nose story lines that show how this era, with its rapidly shifting ideals, is altering our pathways as we walk.

For journalists, Twitter, in particular, functions as an increasingly familiar form of contemporary labor: paid in exposure, pitched as fun. Some of us also write about the online world, making the use of social media a professional necessity. Every week, it seems, a journalist will proclaim, on Twitter, that he is leaving Twitter, or will write an op-ed about how he’s stepping away from social media—a style of essay so common that it was parodied, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. “Fiftee…

Outdoor Voices is frequently described as an athleisure brand, although Haney, who was a serious athlete in her teens, hates the term, associating it with clothes that were made for watching TV while occasionally thinking about the gym. “Every product that we make is made to sweat in,” she has said. Chip Wilson, the Canadian founder of Lululemon, the company sometimes credited with creating the athleisure market, also refuses the label: in his memoir, “Little Black Stretchy Pants,” he insists th…