Who among us has not floated the idea of starting a bookstore to our friends and partners, as a way out of the nightmare that is 9-to-5 work and LinkedIn hell? In 2021, Lucy Yu actually did it. She ha...

The first line in a Min Jin Lee novel gives you the whole story. In Free Food For Millionaires, it’s “Competence can be a curse.” In her follow-up, Pachinko, it’s “History has failed us, but no matter...

Sixteen assaults, no arrests in 2013.

At midnight, Taylor Swift released a four-song update to her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which came out last October and had the cultural impact of a Sketchers sneaker drop. Despite juicing ...

This was supposed to be a nice little blog about a nice little recipe I made using nice little chestnuts I found on my walk yesterday morning. But it’s not.  Here’s what happened.  Yesterday, I discov...

YouTube video by Defector

YouTube video by Defector

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a feature the New York Times published about...

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector’s Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Ju...

Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors’ audience size and nascent trends based on “data,” “vibes,” and “Tik...

YouTube video by Defector

Short review of recent releases.

Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project only for it to devolve into a site of small scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own t...

A fond and nostalgic cultural history of It's a Wonderful Life, celebrating the beloved holiday film's actors and creators, its unexpected journey f...

Despite its apparent ubiquity, the career of “online influencer” is so young that the first generation of people to use that title are not only still working, but still young. Ingrid Nilsen was one of...

You can’t predict an investment piece, writer Mary H.K. Choi contends. And when it arrives, it will mold to your life in ways you never expected.

In my early twenties, a huge part of my job was to convince older journalists in my newsroom to use social media. This is the kind of job that only a young person could have, not just because of my to...

When I was 24, a stranger on the internet called me a white man, and it sent me into such a tailspin that I changed my byline. Before then, I was going by “Alex Laughlin,” just my first and last name....

There’s an apocryphal story concerning the original pitch for Girls: Supposedly, Lena Dunham wrote it on the back of a cocktail napkin. It was all vibes but no plot or fleshed-out characters, and situ...