SSENSE

The fashion business is overrun by nepo babies, and others in Nix’s position might have seen this as an opportunity: to grow a following, to chase clout, to fast-track connections and brand deals. But that’s not her style. Aside from writing a graceful essay in The Cut about her experience, entitled “The Year the World Found Out I Was a Hadid,” she’s quietly worked behind the scenes as an assistant, save for a few stray modeling gigs.

Over the last few years, Brutalismus 3000 have become one of electronic music’s most recognizable acts. Their crowds stretch far beyond the scenes that first embraced them, gathering in festival fields, warehouses, and clubs from Los Angeles to Tokyo. At any show, people are just as likely to be moshing, headbanging, and doing the hakken as they are standing completely still waiting for the next drop. The uniforms vary by city, but the intensity remains the same.

“How do you break the news of what should be fictional? Our journalists are poets, almost, when narrating all this death. And the poets write with knives.” — Mohammed El-Kurd In the summer of 2023, Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and one of the most popular podcasters in the world, invited Benjamin Netanyahu onto his show.

A few weeks ago, I put my advance copy of the novelist Mary HK Choi’s newest novel, Pool House, on the seminar table in my advanced fiction class, and one of my students’ eyes glowed as if I’d just casually set down something made of gold and diamonds. “She has a new novel coming out?” “She does,” I said. “This is her first adult novel.” She couldn’t stop looking at it and so I said, “I will give it to you when I’m done.” She smiled and thanked me.

In conversation, Precious flows between musings on science, math, and philosophy, connecting each discipline to one another, and all back to music. Fittingly, Greek philosopher Plato described geometry, astronomy and music as “kindred sciences,” emphasizing that they are meant to be learned in tandem. “In Arkansas, I’m just always at the library,” she says, listing it as one of her favorite places along with the thrift store.

The old adage is playing onstage is a workout. But what if you already get it in every day? For Julian Pratt, singer of New York City hardcore band Show Me the Body, the show is the nightcap—a light cardio session following the strength workout earlier in the day. It’s meathead behavior firmly established in hardcore, but done up with a twist. Pratt, born in Hell’s Kitchen, has been lifting seriously for a dozen years now—calisthenics and weights—and practiced kung fu for a while before that.

One of the early lessons that Bruce Lee internalized when he was a young man trying to make it in Hollywood came by way of Steve McQueen, the actor, who imparted the following wisdom to the hungry newcomer. “Image is important,” McQueen once told him. “To be successful, you have to look successful.” For a Chinese man in 1960s America, this was obviously easier said than done. There was no preexisting trail for Bruce to follow, no brushy corridors cleared.

“What I wanted to make by design was an inescapable experience where you have to surrender yourself to the film, or at least figure out where you're willing to meet it,” Tuttle continues.

The first rule of birdwatching is don’t call it birdwatching. Among serious aficionados, the preferred terminology is simply “birding”—less observational, more active, more intentional. Diving deep enough into any subculture or niche will reveal a rich glossary of slang, and birding is no different. There are terms like “twitching,” which refers to traveling long distances to spot a rare bird. These types of sightings are often added to something called a "life list,” a sort of birding Pokédex.

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram in the last few months, you’ve almost certainly seen her: a young, stylish, slightly detached young Indian woman with waist-length black hair making quick work of a cup of chai or a steel plate of food before getting up to dap a rickshaw driver and stroll down the middle of a busy Mumbai street in a matching embroidered vest and denim, all to the sounds of Frank Ocean’s “Nights.” Or maybe the video you saw has her leading a goat down an alleyway to...