Pride Month, at it’s core, is a commemoration of rebellion; a period to honour and remember the 1969 Stonewall riots; where predominantly POC members of the LGBT+ community rioted in response to the police raid of the Stonewall Inn. The riot was a turning point in LGBT+ activism, which beforehand had been predominantly non-confrontational and regrettably ineffectual. Stonewall ushered in an entirely new era of LGBT+ activism; one whose rewards the LGBT+ community are still reaping today — even if there’s still so much further to go.

It’s hard not to feel like, however, that Pride’s origin story has been…

For over a decade, the image of a young girl smirking in the foreground as a home in the background is engulfed in flames has circulated as fodder for countless memes. The picture, known simply as Disaster Girl, though originally taken by an amateur photographer — who then entered it into an online contest, sparking its journey across the web — has all but officially entered the public domain. That is, until Thursday, at least technically speaking.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports that the then-young girl in the photo, Zoe Roth (now 21), recently sold the image as a…

Object of the Week

Object of the Week is a column exploring the objects a culture obsesses over and what that reveals about us.

The 21st century has been a time of constant technical innovation — and a time for ridiculously overthinking food. These seemingly unrelated meta-trends have now coalesced in cascatelli, a brand new and meticulously engineered pasta devised over a period of three years by the host of the popular food podcast, The Sporkful.

Naturally, it’s a hit. In the first week of its formal unveiling to the public, the novel noodle has been hyped everywhere from Today to Eater to NPR…

Number Crunch

$10 billion: That’s how much the American film and TV industry stands to gain in annual revenues, a 7% increase from the baseline, by addressing racial inequities prevalent in the industry, according to a recent study by the consultancy McKinsey, and reported in Deadline.

The McKinsey study found that Black-led film and TV projects are consistently underfunded and undervalued even though they tend to outperform other projects when it comes to returns on investment. …

When Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, the chain of swank private member clubs, began plotting his invasion of Hong Kong more than a decade ago, he never could have predicted how bad the timing of its actual debut would be. The city, a former colony of the British Crown, was home to a booming economy, and a thriving urban creative elite — the type to which the London-based club has long catered. Meanwhile, the 50-year “one country, two systems” deal under which Great Britain had transferred sovereignty back to China wasn’t set to expire until 2047.

By the…

Over the past few months, the popularity of Clubhouse, the invite-only, live-audio app, has reached a fever pitch, exploding to 2 million users and reaching a $1 billion valuation in January. The social media platform has proven to be a thriving microcosm for a certain set of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and celebrity influencers, like Elon Musk.

But long before Musk arrived on the scene, as Keith Nelson Jr writes in LEVEL, Black power and influence was at work and held an outsized role in getting Clubhouse off the ground. …

Number Crunch

17.1 million: That’s how many viewers tuned into Oprah’s two-hour interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on CBS last Sunday, according to preliminary data from Nielsen, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In the bombshell interview, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex shared additional context surrounding their departure from the British monarchy last year. Markle also painted a disturbing picture of racism directed at her and her unborn child when she was pregnant with her son, Archie.

For exclusive rights to air the tell-all, CBS struck a deal valued between $7 million and $9 million with Oprah’s production…

The world of online fashion has been going through the same reckoning with white supremacist conspiracy theories as the rest of the internet. Platforms such as Etsy and CafePress were skewered shortly after the January 6 insurrection for hosting merchandise celebrating the event, which caused them to scramble to take some of the incendiary content down. If you type “QAnon” into sites such as Zazzle or Etsy, you will not get any hits, except for maybe a parody “QaNOPE” T-shirt.

This more aggressive posturing, however, has not rid these platforms of conspiracy theory merch. With minimal effort, you can still…