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The Fault in Their Stars (Lauren Markham for Topic)
The current culture encourages people to engage in self-care, to self-examine, to take selfies in which we document our lives as we move through the world and try to better understand our deepest selves. People want easy answers about who we are and how we can best self-actualize. “Astrology is a story about you,” explains Ross Clark, the founder and CEO of the astrology app Sanctuary—a story that “Millennial and Gen Z audiences are really hungry for.”
The Man Behind the Yonge Street Van Attack (Katherine Laidlaw for Toronto Life)
When Minassian was 15, his parents bought him his own computer. He became obsessed with Halo, the first-person shooter game where super-soldiers fight for interstellar domination. In Halo, every player starts with the same abilities—it’s an even playing field, which appealed to Minassian. He played late into the night with a handful of friends and strangers he met online. The Halo community was the perfect place for him. There were no fraught social cues he couldn’t interpret or laughter following him down hallways. He didn’t have to speak to other people, and he didn’t have to feel alone.
The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret (Taffy Brodesser-Akner for the New York Times)
She found out about the pay issue by accident. She had helped recruit Marie Wolf, a woman who had sold a million dollars’ worth of jewelry in one year at the Service Merchandise down the road. According to Dawn, her manager didn’t seem to like Marie, despite the fact that Dawn said she was the top salesperson not just at Service Merchandise but now at Jared as well. She didn’t have “the Jared look,” the manager told Dawn. Marie was tall and wore pants and blouses, not short skirt-suits, and she wore little makeup. One day Marie asked for a raise, and the manager told her she was already making more than any other salesperson in the store.
A Search for Answers/A Search for Blame (Kathryn Joyce for Highline)
Eden tracked the news for violent incidents—like a 2017 high school stabbing in the Bronx—at schools that had adopted the new approach. Still, compared to other education debates that riled up conservatives, such as campus sexual assault or bathroom access for transgender students, discipline reform never really caught on. There was, Eden said, no natural Republican “political constituency” for his issue.
The Gentle Side of Twitch (Nicole Carpenter for Gizmodo)
Now owned by Amazon, Twitch launched in 2011 as an off-shoot of broader live-streaming platform Justin.tv. These days, Twitch has a reported three million streamers broadcasting from the platform each month, the company announced in December 2018. On average, that’s nearly half a million users live-streaming on Twitch each day, reaching more than 15 million viewers every day—according to Twitch, each of those users spends around 95 minutes, on average, watching streams each day.
Photo: Eric Kilby