Vibes
Story Stream
Tony Tulathimutte and the Literary Vibe Shift January 28, 2025
For a while, the story about contemporary publishing has been that men are out. Especially unwelcome are stories about male desire and frustration. The last person anyone in literary publishing wants to hear from, or about, is a creepy, entitled ince...
How Do We Understand Culture? January 28, 2025
The liberal critics demand evidence. This is nothing new, and I don’t blame them. I practice journalism, which is evidence-based, and I have been consuming Nate Silver since he was a young baseball writer during the Bush administration. Statistics, f...
Vibe Drift January 27, 2025
In June of 2021, Sean Monahan, one of the founders of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (of “normcore” fame) who now writes a newsletter called 8Ball, coined the term “vibe shift” to refer to an emerging cultural transformation, one whose contours w...
Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers January 10, 2025
The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content polic...
The 21st-Century Bad Vibes Movie Canon September 12, 2024
You’re probably familiar with the concept of feel-good movies: the tried-and-true serotonin boosters that can improve your mood in the midst of a bad day, week, or, God forbid, month. (Shout out to my current go-to, Everybody Wants Some!!, a coming-o...
Pope Francis on Literature September 09, 2024
Pope Francis’s pontificate has been, to put it mildly, controversial. His judgments—theological, administrative, and otherwise—have generally cheered those who seem to want the Catholic Church to resemble the liberal Protestant groups that are evapor...
MJ Lenderman, Indie Rock’s No. 1 Prospect, Goes Pro September 09, 2024
Five years ago, War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley moved to Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and young daughter. He’d lived in Philadelphia for 16 years, but his band had spent time recording and touring in the small Blue Ridge Mountains city....
The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom September 06, 2024
Goodbye forever, brat summer. Thanks to you, slime green has joined the viral-color pantheon alongside minion yellow and millennial pink. When our fairy bratmother, the pop star Charli XCX, named her sixth album “brat,” she inaugurated a season of pe...
Death by Vibes August 20, 2024
Breadlines are brat. Are you cuckoo for Coconut? Are you brat? Does the joy of a kind-hearted wine aunt running for president, or her folksy grandpa running mate who once read to a class of kindergartners for a photo op, make you “happy”? Early last ...
Culture Froze in the Biden Era. Is It Finally Heating Up? August 15, 2024
Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the ...
Our Civilizational Moment August 14, 2024
Vexed by the apocalyptic vibes of the last few months, I recently went back and re-read the controversial book Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington. The book was controversial...
