Posts from Popula

Over the decade-plus when I made my income mostly through online writing—here and there were a few short-term gigs, like P.A. work on commercials and odd-jobs like writing entrance exams for rich people trying to get their three-year-olds into illustrious pre-K schools—there was always the lingering idea that as long as I stayed afloat, it’d all work out.

A roundtable on addressing the structural breakdown of media

Fried chicken, the signature dish of Korean neoliberalism

Afghanistan's troubled film history, examined in a new documentary

The magic of solving a cryptic crossword is in the joy of discovery. It’s a playful, thought-provoking, confounding, and strangely amusing pastime—a world away from solving standard crosswords, where, in all but the most subtle examples, cleverness and wordplay take a back seat to the exercise of memory and a kind of pattern recognition.

A call for submissions from our friends at the new CAPE MAG

Conspiracy theories are apparently a side effect of the Delta variant in Taiwan

An entire, incredibly lucrative subsection of San Francisco was obsessed with its own specialness, obsessed with its own branding, obsessed with rhizomatically repopulating the place with the wealthy and the connected and the well-named and the delicious and the glossy and the expensive and the beautifully off-kilter and the minimalist and the carefully plated and the monetized history and sun sliding down over the ocean and the fig trees.

Crime and punishment in the illegal wildlife trades

Who you gonna be tonight

Is this the last magazine I'll read before I die?

A love letter to the Tiki Adult Theater: "When it’s gone, where will all these lost souls go?" While Los Angeles used to be a hot spot for smut shacks, the Tiki is now the last show in town — the Studs, née Pussycat, Theater down Santa Monica Boulevard was, for years, the only other holdout, but no longer plays skin flicks. The Tiki, however, continues, in spite of it all, to screen three “very recent” ones on an endless loop, operating 24 hours a day. Time is purchased in four, eight, and 12-hour blocks; bottles of poppers, the only concessions, are sold at the box office for $20.

The English language arrived in India with the British colonists of the 17th century, giving rise to unique genres and variants, including some that characterize formal communications on the subcontinent to this day. “It seems that some judges have unrealised literary dreams,” one former judge told me. “Maybe it’s a colonial hangover, or the feeling that obfuscation is a sign of merit… It can then become a 300-page judgment, just pontificating."