J. Danielle

Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There's no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I've ever seen is Billie Eilish's Tiny Desk performance.

You'd think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the... See more

Before we had vibes, we had the chillier, more Germanic zeitgeist. Both tap into our appetite for locating our lives within a bigger picture. But vibes are crowd-sourced and ground-up, where the zeitgeist was ordained by experts, a trickle-down form of cultural economics.

W. David Marx argues in his book “Status and Culture.” We want what other people have in order to fit in, but eventually abandon those same things once we see them as too accessible to the masses.