Lifestyle

This piece originally appeared as part of Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List, in the July/August 2021 issue of the magazine. Recently this thing has been happening to Brandan Robertson. He’ll be at a gay bar, minding his own business (sort of), when someone will approach to ask, “Are you a pastor by any chance?” Robertson

On June 29th, director and conceptual artist Ani Acopian posted a tweet announcing the launch of a service called PostDates, along with a short, tongue-in-cheek promotional video. The conceit of the app was simple: “We get your stuff back from your ex so you don’t have to,” the tweet read. For a small fee —

While standing in line for the Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT a few years ago, Hex, now 28, scrolled through Twitter to help pass time, pausing to look at “ze/zis” listed in someone’s bio. Hex’s wife explained what that meant, that those were an example of neopronouns — a new category of pronouns that are

Season Two of the podcast Tabloid starts by challenging our assumptions about sex tapes. Specifically, that whoever made them must have released them on purpose. Particularly at a time when people share every facet of their life for attention on social media, it’s hard to imagine recording anything — let alone something as tantalizing as

Heat is entropy. Heat is chaos. The hotter something gets, the more kinetic energy it has: molecules vibrate, relationships change, life overheats, things die. You can see that out west right now. Last week, a heat dome formed over the Great Plains all the way out to the California coast. Salt Lake City boiled at

The Supreme Court handed down an important decision protecting the free-speech rights of high school students, in a case involving a fed-up cheerleader and profane rant on Snapchat. The gist of the case is simple: Brandi Levy, a rising high school freshman was having a bad week. She didn’t make the varsity cheerleading squad for

The stolen airplane began rolling forward under its own power, with no one in the cockpit. The twin engines of the Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 aircraft had been set to idle. But without anyone riding the brakes, the 13-foot propellers began pushing the plane slowly toward the runways of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The

On Friday, a Minnesota judge sentenced white former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, the black, unarmed father of five whose neck Chauvin pressed his knee into for nine-and-a-half minutes on May 25, 2020. The killing sparked weeks of worldwide protests against police brutality and

John McAfee was a genius, a scoundrel-criminal, a gun fanatic, a possible murderer, and a man who liked to mix morning tequila sunrises with hands dirtied by throwing mattresses against his windows to ward off imaginary hit men. He also ran for president. Yesterday, he finally ran out of road. It appears the 75-year-old McAfee

By now, the story of Jeffrey Epstein is well known. When the accused sex trafficker died — officially ruled a suicide by hanging in his jail cell almost two years ago — the public was left baffled alongside victims that were denied justice. There seemed to be much more to the story than the satisfaction

Chef Wolfgang Puck discussed his numerous culinary exploits and shared stories about Pink Floyd and The Simpsons, on the latest installment of Rolling Stone’s “The First Time.” Puck — who’s the subject of the new Disney+ documentary, Wolfgang, out June 25th — has been one of the best-known chefs in the world for decades, though

Thanks to the popularity of shows like The Masked Singer and Love Is Blind, there’s been an explosion of content in the genre that can best be summarized as “people hiding their faces and doing things.” The latest entry is Netflix’s Sexy Beasts, a dating show in which the contestants don prosthetics and makeup to conceal their faces, the trailer for

The YouTuber David Dobrik is driving his white Tesla through the verdant hills of suburban Los Angeles, explaining the challenges of selling thin-crust-style pizza in L.A., his assistant Natalie texting in the back seat and Billy Joel on pause on the stereo, when he abruptly stops talking. “I got this,” he says. “Don’t worry, guys.”

Riley Sager has been writing thrillers for over a decade now, but each time he starts penning another, he’s gripped by the same terrible thought. “There’s always this moment where I sit there and look at my blank page and think, ‘I don’t know how to do this,’” says Sager, who spent the first half

Since joining SNL three years ago as a staff writer and then cast member — the show’s first full-Asian series regular — Bowen Yang has managed to stage a subtle millennial coup by queering the late-night comedy staple, bringing in hordes of new fans who are eager to scream “Yasss!” to his takes on everything

Until this day, no out man has ever played on an American professional football team. That means Americans have never turned on the TV to see an honest gay man in the end zone. Las Vegas Raiders’ Carl Nassib made history on Monday by casually coming out as gay via social media. While retired players

When University of Chicago scholars Michael Dawson and Rovana Popoff took a survey of American attitudes in 2000, they found that only four percent of white Americans endorsed black reparations. By 2016, a Marist Poll indicated that the proportion had increased to 15 percent. A 2018 survey taken by Data for Progress discovered that a

The Department of Veterans Affairs is moving to lift a 20-year ban on gender confirmation surgeries for trans people and will allow the procedure to be covered under VA benefits, Secretary Denis McDonough is expected to announce Saturday. “[This is] allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA by their

At the height of the pandemic (or about a million years ago in internet time), the reality TV competition Slag Wars became a minor cult hit. Hosted by adult performers and LGBTQ icons the Cock Destroyers, the show set out to find the next LGBTQ icon, or “slag,” and was marketed as one of the most

This column is a collaboration with DoubleBlind, a print magazine and media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement. Erinn Baldeschwiler had already been having a rough go of it. A mother of two teens, she was going through a divorce, moving out of her house, and splitting from her business partner all as the