Nick Jackson

Doors Closing: “Whereas the L was once a societal leveler, the means by which Chicagoans of all types went to their job or school or party, frustration with its unreliable service and fears about safety are leading those who can to abandon it.” www.chicagomag.com/chicago-maga...

When Real Life Calls for a Cheesy Rom-Com Gesture: “Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/m...

How Neon Lit Up Indie Cinema in the Letterboxd Era: “‘If you’re going to follow someone into the fire of starting a company in this industry, why not make it the most excited person in the room who truly just loves the shit out of movies.’” theringer.com/2025/01/22/m...

The Most Luxurious Use of Eggs, by Way of Japan: “In truth, it has always been luxurious, the fatty yolk like a ripe sun, the protein-rich white. We just took this bounty for granted.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/m...

Smells Like American Spirit: “We’re all trapped in the back-office cubicle pod, our desperation rebranded as hustle, bitter entrepreneurs of abjection competing for the same dwindling pool of broke rubes.” slate.com/life/2024/12...

Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump Make More Sense Together Than You Think: “When such social spaces are a central component of your life and work, the dating pool can self-select into something exceedingly narrow.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/m...

The Techno-Utopians Who Want to Colonize the Sea: “The history of seasteading is littered with cool-looking renderings that never came to be, for places with names like Oceania and New Utopia.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/m...

The Lure of Divorce: “I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.” www.thecut.com/article/marr...

The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself: “Why did a successful, financially sophisticated banker, a man the whole town trusted for decades, gamble his life away for a shot at crypto riches?” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/m...

Does the Knot Have a ‘Fake Brides’ Problem?: “Documents I obtained from the Federal Trade Commission reflect that, since 2018, more than two hundred formal complaints have been made about allegedly fraudulent activity on the Knot and WeddingWire.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

21st-Century Cinema in Review: The Fellowship of the Ring: “[N]o one has managed to so fully and so poetically use the new tools of movie magic to create a world and atmosphere that feel both as dreamlike and as tangible as in LOTR.” www.theringer.com/2025/03/28/m...

He Dialed 911 to Save His Baby. Then His Children Were Taken Away.: “Even if parents who are accused challenge an abusive-head-trauma diagnosis with medical experts of their own, prosecutors tend to view these witnesses cynically.” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/m...

21st-Century Cinema in Review: Collateral: “What strikes me most when rewatching Collateral today, however, is how much heart there is in the film, and how that tenderness is put into sharp relief thanks to this digital look.” www.theringer.com/2025/04/25/m...

Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.: “‘They have a relationship with him. Then I come in and I sort of fulfill their idea of who that person is. I’m also one of them, in that I have a relationship.’” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/m...

Is Mikhail Baryshnikov the Last of the Highbrow Superstars?: “[H]e has always been stubbornly devoted to art-making itself, and he may be among the most famous people in this country who can say that.” www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/m...

‘Is He Threatening Enough?’: “When Gandolfini showed up in the waiting room of Dr. Melfi’s office in the pilot episode of The Sopranos ... it was clear he’d found the role that would engage all his talents, plus more he hadn’t yet tapped into.” www.vulture.com/article/the-...

The Anti-Social Century: “Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over.” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’: Inside the Murdochs’ Succession Drama: “He had come to see the mission of Fox News in particular as vital to the future of the free world and believed that it would be a disaster if it fell into more liberal hands.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/m...

Monumental Tiny News: “El Puente, which Lippard often refers to as a newsletter (‘What’s the difference?’ she asked me), is an extraordinary (mostly solo) work of journalism, a map of history in progress, revealing a shifting landscape.” www.cjr.org/feature-2/lu...

How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right: “While other ... youth groups had contented themselves with offering up celebrity speakers, Kirk’s group was training and even funding student-government candidates, as a kind of PAC for youngsters.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/m...

How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell: “I fear my drive for sweets is evidence of a problem that will remain undetectable until the day my, in hindsight, obviously poor choices cause me to be struck down with no warning.” www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/m...

Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex: “Year after year, with the right conditions, perennials continue to flower. Likewise, the sexual Perennial finds herself still well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/m...

Behind the Camera, Movies Are Still #SoWhite: “Casts have long been more diverse than less public-facing crews — though casts are also far from representative of the population at large — but lately, the two groups’ proportions of people of color have further diverged.” theringer.com/2025/04/23/m...

Why Did Woj Take a 99% Pay Cut? To Save the Team He Loves.: “A reporter his entire adult life, he has immersed himself in other people’s teams. St. Bonaventure ... is his team. And as the ground continues to shift beneath college sports, perhaps only he can save it.” www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/m...

Why Airline Pilots Feel Pushed to Hide Their Mental Illness: “Pilots are taught early — by those who went before them, by those around them — that being honest with the FAA about any aspect of their medical history can jeopardize their careers.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/m...

My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse: “The constant doomerism online and the deteriorating social infrastructure offline — it all had put me into a kind of spiritual ketosis. Brushing up on my survival skills felt like one potential answer.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/m...

Ramy Youssef Is Just Trying to Be ‘Emotionally Correct’: “My obligation above all is to try and hit what something feels like right on the head. ... The nail I don’t want to be asked to hit is to spread facts and information. I don’t want that obligation.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/m...

Farmer Wants a Wife Has Its Title Backward: “Social media is packed with down-home fantasies featuring agricultural influencers, rural ‘tradwives,’ or the swineherds on TikTok.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/m...

The List Keepers: “More than 40 years after the start of the epidemic, the full numerical scope of the toll AIDS took on the world of theater in New York remains difficult to assess.” www.vulture.com/article/hiv-...

Our Gardener Wants to Avoid Taxes. Should We Pay Him in Cash?: “I get your anger, but the way to fix a flawed system is through democratic reform, not some individual act of noncompliance.” www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/m...