SSENSE

At the center of Stan Squirewell’s new exhibition, The Weight of Grace, is a house. On view at Harlem’s Claire Oliver Gallery until the end of October, the exhibition consists of 14 mixed-media works, soft sculptures, and installations, with the central conflict or theme being that of family history, which makes it apt that a real house is what dominates the show.

Jeans have always been subtle indicators of big cultural shifts. When Kendrick Lamar hit the Super Bowl halftime stage in flared Celine jeans, the Internet went into a frenzy, and sales spiked. When Gap debuted its viral, slickly choreographed campaign with KATSEYE set to “Milkshake,” it signaled a fresh new era for the brand’s identity. Now, Hailey Bieber is bringing back late-1990s aesthetics with her “Hailey Jean,” fueling a full-blown resurgence of essential basics.

In the 1998 film Slam, Saul Williams stars as “Raymond Johnson,” a teen from Southeast who’s thrown into Washington’s infamous D.C. jail on a petty drug charge. It’s senseless and cruel and jarring. The thing is, Ray’s a poet. During his time behind bars, he retreats into his writing as a place of solace and eventually a source of empowerment.

An overcast afternoon in New York City’s Chinatown, some non-fussy coffee shop. Chris Black, a downtown fixture, lives nearby with his wife, and this neighborhood joint is one of his spots. We’re seated across from each other at a tall table, and he’s showing me something confidential on his phone—information that, under less transactive circumstances, would most likely remain private, known only between him and his god. “4:35 hours!” he said, pleasantly shocked.

Having already produced generational talent for years, the skate scene coalesced around Tilt Mode, a crew that drew worldwide attention to the bedroom community’s extremely gifted and deep pool of skaters. Most of that energy seemed to orbit around one skater in particular: Jerry Hsu, who turned pro at 17 and has ever since treated his body as an experiment, willing to annihilate himself at times in order to meet his own impossibly high standards.

It takes a lot of work to make fantasies come true, but that’s what New York designer Sandy Liang has been doing every season for her fellow apostles of girlishness for over a decade.

Everyone is searching for the perfect white T-shirt. Truth be told, no matter how many already hang in our closets, it never feels like enough. It remains one of a wardrobe’s simplest yet most elusive staples. This quest for the ideal tee is a shared obsession—one that bridges the everyday shopper and the designer alike. Consider how back in 2006, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen founded The Row with a single, foundational mission: to design the perfect white T-shirt.

New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv has built a reputation writing probing profiles of overworked nurses, wronged women, and toxic mothers. The latter forms the theme of her new book published in July, You Won’t Get Free Of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, which centers on the tangled knot of the matrilineal relationship. On the first page she reveals that her mother dreamed of writing for The New Yorker and composing her own novel in the style of Madame Bovary.

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