special culture

Archives 2024

Welcome to Bon Iver Fall

Last week, Paul Mescal posted what some might consider a cry for help on his Instagram Stories: a live recording of Bon Iver’s cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt. While we all know by now that the actor enjoys a sad bop, Mescal’s attraction to the musical stylings of Bon Iver feels especially apropos this time of year. The weather is changing, summer flings are dying out, and the country feels on the brink of political turmoil. Enter Justin Vernon.

After Brat Summer painted the world chartreuse, it seemed unclear, for a time, what would happen come autumn, when the hangover set in. As it turns out, Charli XCX had the answer all along: This month, the singer released her latest brat variant, brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a remixed album overflowing with high-profile features—including one from Bon Iver on “I think about it all the time.” (Vernon told The New Yorker that agreeing to do the track was “a no-brainer.”) In its original state, the song is a rumination on Charli’s biological clock, and not wanting to sacrifice her career to have kids. But with a downtempo beat and some vocal modulation, its remix becomes a broader treatise on love and loneliness, as Vernon croons: “You’re lonely and you’re / And you’re asking, ‘When did it get so hard?’” Charli and Vernon also sample Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and interpolate Bon Iver’s “Nick of Time,” engineering a track that neatly bridges the two artists’ sonic universes.

The Underrated Joy of Being a Working Mother

The internet loves a woman who fits neatly into a category. The tradwife, basking in the glow of freshly baked sourdough, her life an ode to nostalgic domesticity. The childfree-by-choice woman, sipping Aperol Spritzes on a sunlit balcony, her autonomy celebrated as liberation.

But the working mother, who exists somewhere in the middle? She rarely commands such a romantic narrative. Instead, she’s cast as the emblem of exhaustion: screaming into the ether, and crushed under the weight of challenges both systemic and deeply personal.

These images are rooted in truth. The working mother does carry a heavy load, navigating systems designed for a reality that no longer exists. She balances work, family, and self in a world that too often feels indifferent to her needs. But to focus only on her struggles is to miss an equally vital truth: the joy that comes from holding two worlds in tandem, and finding pleasure and meaning in both.

I love being a working mother. I love my job, which challenges me to think on my feet, exposes me to interesting people, and allows me to collaborate with colleagues who respect and value me. I love my son, who is funny, insightful, and full of curiosity, and with whom I share a bond that feels both profound and utterly unique. And most of all, I love that I get to do both of these things at the same time.

Part of that joy comes from knowing this life wasn’t a given—not for me, nor for many of the women I grew up around. In the lower-middle-class community where I spent my childhood, most mothers stayed at home—not out of ideological conviction, but because they had few other options. My own mother, a working-class woman who didn’t finish high school, never had the chance to chase her dreams, or even the space to imagine what they might be. I grew up internalizing the idea that motherhood required you to set your ambitions aside, at least for a while.

In contrast to the norms I grew up with, I returned to work just five weeks after my son was born, to help put the finishing touches on a play I’d been producing. I continued working part-time during his baby and toddler years, partly because I wanted to and partly because it was all I could afford. My husband and I saw childcare as a joint expense, but with my earnings so modest, it was hard to justify full-time care.

TXT Embraces a New R&B Sound on Their Latest Album, The Star Chapter: Sanctuary

Today, Tomorrow x Together (TXT) unveiled their seventh mini album, The Star Chapter: Sanctuary, made up of six new tracks that take listeners on a heavenly sonic journey.

The members of TXT—Yeonjun, Hueningkai, Soobin, Taehyun, and Beomgyu—have come a long way since 2019, when they first arrived on the scene as teenagers, attracting a following with pop songs like “Crown” and “Blue Orangeade.” Now that they’re in their early 20s, not only does their new music feature more mature lyrics—some of which were written by the members themselves—but the album also leans into an R&B sound, heard perhaps most plainly on the song “Danger.” In that way, The Star Chapter: Sanctuary could be likened to Justified, Justin Timberlake’s first album outside of NSYNC, which featured raunchier songs like “Rock Your Body”—except, in the case of TXT, the members are exploring who they are as adults all together.

As Taehyun tells Vogue, “The 2000s music scene was filled with incredible hits and legendary R&B artists. While preparing for this album, we explored a diversity of R&B songs, which allowed us to capture a groovy rhythm in our recordings.” Adds Soobin, “The Star Chapter: Sanctuary opens a new chapter in a unique narrative, delving into the universal language of love.”

But while the group members spent some time looking into the past for their latest record, they also wanted to stay true to the infectious modern sound that has so resonated with their fanbase. As Beomgyu puts it, “Instead of simply reinterpreting the sound [of R&B], I wanted to create something fresh that still carries a hint of nostalgia for everyone to enjoy.” When you put two and two together, you get an album from TXT that can be appreciated across generations.

With the new album, we can also expect the members to show off their finely honed dance skills, both in TikTok challenges and across their music videos. For anyone wondering how long it takes a professional boy band to learn their choreography, Yeonjun and Hueningkai let us into the process a bit: “Typically, learning brand-new choreography takes about five hours and around eight days to look fully perfect,” Yeonjun says. “This was the case for mastering the choreography for [the lead single] ‘Over the Moon.’” At other points, Hueningkai explains, “There are times when we need to learn modified choreography for specific tracks, if we’re performing a special remix for our tour or music festival appearances.”

Relationships Take Center Stage in the Museum of Arts and Design’s New Craft Show

The first time the artist Eve Biddle exhibited her work alongside her mother’s, she was a bit nervous. It was 2018, 20 years after she lost her mom, Mary Ann Unger, to breast cancer. Unger used materials like bronze, marble, and steel to make her mammoth sculptures. “Mom’s work has a loud voice,” says Biddle, whose own work crosses disciplines and is often smaller in scale. But Alexandra Schwartz, the curator of that 2018 show, knew it would be a powerful pairing despite the artists’ different styles. “She told me, ‘You can see two voices,’” Biddle recalls. One didn’t drown the other out—they harmonized.

Since then, sculptural works from Biddle and Unger have continued to appear together in exhibitions, most recently in “Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces,” which opened in early June at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. Also curated by Schwartz, this third iteration of “Craft Front & Center,” on view through next April, places more than 60 works from MAD’s extensive collection in dialogue with contemporary artists. The works span more than 80 years, and most are composed of the core craft materials of fiber, ceramic, and glass.

Installation view of “Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces.” In the foreground: Kay Sekimachi’s Kunoyuki, c. 1968 (center) and Trude Guermonprez’s Banner, 1962 (far right).

Photo: Jenna Bascom; courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design.

Normani on Confidence, Creativity, and Finally Achieving Lift-Off With Her Debut Album Dopamine

On “Big Boy”—the opening track of her debut album, Dopamine—Normani makes it clear she’s arrived. “Only ever see this type of shit in the movies,” she sings over blaring horns and clattering percussion. “Only ever see this type of shit once in your life.” Taken in combination with the striking album artwork, which sees Normani strapped to a shiny black rocket, it’s a statement of intent: Normani is finally ready for launch.

“Finally” because, as any Normani fans know, it’s been a long road to lift-off. First rising to fame as part of Fifth Harmony—the girl group that became The X Factor’s greatest success, selling nearly 15 million units in the United States alone—Normani appeared to be the member best equipped to become a solo success, thanks to her exacting taste and jaw-dropping abilities as a dancer and performer. And, with a handful of collaborative singles that hit the top 10, as well as the Max Martin-produced banger “Motivation,” which received critical acclaim for its power-pop sound and Y2K-throwback video, she came out of the gate swinging.

Yet as the years rolled on, the distance between Normani’s beginnings as a solo artist—she first announced an album was on the way six years ago—and the release of said album has been the subject of heated discussion. (Indeed, the URL for the website announcing Dopamine winkingly reads wheresthedamnalbum.com.) More recently, it emerged that the delays were due, in part, to both of her parents being diagnosed with cancer, prompting a period when Normani’s focus was, understandably, trained on her family and not her career. (They have both since recovered.) Yet the enthusiasm of her fans around the project has never abated—a fact that she’s grateful for. “It’s been a journey of endurance, so I’m most excited about finishing what I started, finally,” she tells Vogue of releasing the album.

Finish it she has, and then some. Dopamine is packed to the rafters with genre-bending hits that nod to the heyday of some of Normani’s biggest influences: the thundering percussion of Timbaland, the effortlessly raunchy wordplay of Missy Elliott, the silky-smooth vocals of Brandy. (The latter even makes an appearance on the standout track “Insomnia,” her feathery ad-libs threaded through the background.) But it also showcases Normani’s more vulnerable side, not least on the atmospheric James Blake collab “Tantrums,” which charts the dissolution of a relationship over reverb-laden synths and skittering beats. It turns out Dopamine was more than worth the wait—and with its rollercoaster ride through the history of R&B, it fully lives up to the euphoric promise of its title.

The Best Documentaries of 2024
100% That Bitch: My (Brief) Life as a Show Dog for Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra

People think we are color blind. This is not so. Canines can, in fact, see color; we have two cones in our eyes that detect yellow and blue. (It’s called dichromatic vision, those with thumbs can google it.) You humans have three cones, the third allowing you to distinguish red and green. Personally, the omission of Christmas colors doesn’t affect me greatly. I don’t care about the hue of the grass where I relieve myself; I don’t care if prosciutto loses its rosy luster, as long as it’s thinly sliced and there’s plenty of it. Like Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name is still as sweet. (That said, TBH I don’t love Shakespeare. Only one dog features in the entirety of his oeuvre and he’s a whelp named Crab in Two Gentlemen of Verona who doesn’t get much airtime and belongs to a servant rather than either of the titular gentlemen…but I digress.)

Back to my color regrets: I did feel left out at Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra’s 2024 “Best in Show” extravaganza when I could not distinguish the crisp shade of candy apple on Jacqueline Novak’s scallop-trim cardigan skirt suit from the highlighter green apple color of the beading on a colleague’s leash. Lately I’ve heard a lot of human chatter describing this color as “brat,” and each time my ears perk to attention since it sounds a lot like “rat” and my ancestors were ratters.

Speaking of my ancestors, my name is Magnolia and I am a Chihuahua mix who is available for adoption from Animal Haven. I received second place in Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra’s “Best in Show” pageant. But I was not best in show, was I? Because second-best is not number one, and I’m not quite ready to move on. I wore a gorgeous toile puffer jacket that matched the one worn by my exuberant human, Larry Owens. We both had charisma and charm to spare, however, I lost to Elmer, as decided by a woman people seem to know named Bridget Everett who had treats in her beaded crossbody Fifi bag. Third place went to handsome Alfie, whose human was confusingly dressed like a Dalmatian but was, in fact, an actor named Sandra Bernhard who spoke in a gravely low timbre rather than the squeaky register that humans tend to prefer for dogs and babies, even though they know our hearing is much more sensitive. Sandra Dalmatian had a strong energy, and I thought, Here is a woman who might be hard to muzzle. And also, is she vaccinated?