Alex Burns

Send handwritten letters

In this essay, I go deep on a Great American Bromance: the handwritten letters shared between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think most of us are so out of touch touch with letter writing (beyond stiff wedding Thank Yous) that we’d assume letters demand a formal comportment — and are therefore boring, onerous,... See more

Yesterday, ESPN reported that Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator who is accused of stealing $16 million from Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani to pay for his gambling addiction,has a connection to The Real Housewives of Orange County .

I really never thought this day would come. An ESPN headline about one of the biggest sports betting... See more

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”

These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.

“Hot girl food” is about a sense of romanticizing simplicity; like the act of cracking open a can of smoked fish, “hot girl food” is seemingly effortless. But of course, even the things that are portrayed to us as “effortless” require effort; this is the myth of “no makeup” makeup, or the “effortless dinner party” that can be flung together with... See more

21st century privacy : Why do teens have so many randos on Find My Friends? Do CCTVs work? Who ought we most fear surveillance from: corporations, the government, or each other? Should I tell Claude my secrets? Should I use a period tracking app? How much will people trade privacy for safety and convenience? What is being lost, and how might we... See more

The past several years have ushered in a wave of “brand” tales in Hollywood—films that speak to America’s prodigious capitalist ethos, just in case you forgot to look at a billboard. From Blackberry to Air to Flamin’ Hot ,these films have captured the full spectrum of brand power, documenting the highs, lows, and synthetic cheeses of big business.... See more

These habits help form what Hall and his co-author Andy Merolla, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, call the social biome, a way of thinking about the entire range of your social interactions. A healthy social biome is one with variety — among the types of people we talk to and the kinds of conversations we have — as well as... See more