If settlement agreements filed on Monday are approved, up to 1,400 people may claim up to three free buttered muffins, bagels or other baked goods from the 23 locations in Grafton, Leominster, Lowell, Millbury, Shrewsbury, Westborough and Worcester. Customers would not need to show a receipt of a previous purchase. The stores will be required to use only butter — no margarine or butter substitute — for a year. If they use butter substitutes in the future, the menus will have to explicitly say so.
Local Hero Sues For Butter was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Meet this summer’s most inescapable and possibly sinister blouse.
For the past hundred years or so, a button-down shirt was just a button-down shirt. It had buttons, and it was a shirt. Pretty much everyone in the universe owned one. They weren’t, like, amazing, but they were fine, and particularly useful if you were a businessperson or went to Catholic school. For everybody else, they covered up the parts a shirt should cover up, and that was that. They were shirts.
That is, until about six months ago, when something very odd began happening to shirts. Brands you can’t afford — brands with names you probably don’t even know — started doing things to shirts that didn’t really need all that much improvement in the first place.
Things like slashing out the middle part of the arm for no apparent reason. Or turning these on-the-shoulder shirts into off-the-shoulder shirts by pairing up the buttons wrong. Or adding so many ruffles that it stops being a shirt altogether and just becomes the bottom half of a flamenco dancer’s dress that’s made out of Brooks Brothers fabric and costs $650.
In short, what started as a good idea — well-tailored blouses in cool, architectural silhouettes — has morphed into a phenomenon so unwieldy that it’s almost impossible to find a regular shirt without 55 non-functioning knots attached to it anymore.
And as of a few weeks ago, I had just about had enough. It seemed as though ever since these shirts — The Shirts, as they will henceforth be called — came to be, society had only gotten worse, and if it wasn’t The Shirts’ fault, then maybe they were at least a symptom of something deeply sinister.
Because at this point, The Shirts are no longer confined to expensive department stores. Their derivatives have invaded our Zaras, our Ann Taylors, and even our Forever 21s, which means that for the next six months and possibly longer, you will be surrounded by Shirts as far as the eye can see.
But how do you know, when you’re scanning the crowds of that one cool flea market where everybody wears weird jeans and furry shoes, whether someone is wearing a shirt or a Shirt? Here are a few key elements they all must share in common:
The Shirt will be made of either 100 percent cotton or poplin (which is essentially thicc cotton).
The Shirt will be an unassuming color traditionally associated with business, such as white, light blue, or, if it’s an advanced Shirt, white and light blue pinstripes.
The Shirt will be asymmetrical.
The Shirt will be referred to by the brand as “shirting,” or perhaps more specifically, “luxury shirting.”
The Shirt will give the vague impression that somebody has wrapped you in a picnic blanket.
The Shirt would not look out of place on a lady pirate.
Of course, as Shirts are inherently extra, they often include even more bizarre qualities not included in the above list. Below is a complete taxonomy of Shirts, and yes, more than one of them costs upwards of one thousand dollars!
I like to call this shirt Shirt Zero. It is the Shirtiest, least-connected-to-reality shirt I have ever seen, and I hope whomever owns it cherishes it forever.
After undergoing property-wide renovations, the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, California has rebooted, if you will, its lobby bar and lounge, bringing it up to date to reflect its position in the heart of Silicon Valley. And, in true Silicon Valley fashion, the hotel has added a new feature with an inscrutable name that comes pre-loaded with plenty of hubris and technobabble. Called [esc](get it? you get it) the new lobby bar is more than just a random assortment of letters and punctuation: according to a press release, it’s also “a dynamic and multifaceted lounge-style lobby and dining space, the very first of its kind in Palo Alto.”
While we’re a little skeptical of that last claim (surely there are other lobbies in Palo Alto?), [esc] offers the usual locally sourced bonafides, only dressed up in tech-centric decor that’s “inspired by the communal and collaborative open-concept offices used by well-known Silicon Valley start-ups.” Highlights include: a 10-by-7-foot video wall, bespoke music playlists and “check-in pods” instead of a reception desk.
On the food front, things are a little more straightforward and even a little bit nicer than you’ll find in your standard startup kitchen. The lounge, which is separate from the hotel’s full restaurantQuattro,will offer coffee from Caffe Umbria and pastries baked in-house, plus open-faced tartines and charcuterie for midday bites. In the evenings, [esc] will pivot into a wine bar with weekly oysters and caviar nights, plus its own technological aspect: PLUM’s on-demand, wine by the glass touchscreen system will be pouring selections from several local wineries without the need for unfortunate human interaction. The hotel also intends to install PLUM devices in “select rooms” starting this summer. So, in Silicon Valley at least, the hotel lobby bartender has now been replaced by technology.
The lounge opens Saturday, April 1st. And, yes, Eater confirmed this is not an April Fool’s prank.
Even if you're not the type to make a special trip out for a birthday freebie (or two or ten), this is definitely one that might change your mind. Purveyor of stylishly chic candles, Diptyque, will hand over a gift to you on your very special day. We just have one very pressing question: Why did no one tell us about this sooner??
At the beginning of (and throughout) every month, Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video add new movies and TV shows to their libraries. Some of these may also have previously been on Amazon, only to have been removed and then added back. For more comprehensive coverage of the best titles available on Amazon and elsewhere, check out Vulture’s What to Stream Now hub, which is updated throughout the month.
Sleek and suspenseful: The Handmaiden
Park Chan-Wook can never control himself, and cinema thanks him for it. After years of depraved revenge epics and other weird experiments like Stoker, he tried to settle down with a period romance set among the upper class in Japan-occupied Korea — and wound up making one of the most breathless, action-packed films of the year. The twisty storytelling gives us the pleasure of being conned over and over again, as a young Korean thief poses as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress so she can steal her fortune, only for the two women to fall quite lustily for each other. From there, the double-crosses stack high as every frame of this empowerment thriller smuggled inside an erotic fantasy crackles with unreserved glee. Available April 13 on Prime.
Talk of the town: In a World…
The era of the movie trailer voiceover appears to be pretty much kaput these days, since kids today prefer their advertising with sped-up editing and minimal explanation. In another 10 years, few will recognize the title of writer-director-star Lake Bell’s fiendishly clever 2013 comedy as a reference to the trailer catchphrase made famous by voiceover artist Don LaFontaine. But that only means Bell’s savvy and very funny industry satire gets to serve a double purpose as a time capsule of that moment when Hollywood had such an odd obsession with cartoonishly deep male voices, and why it would be so hard for someone like Bell to infiltrate that clubhouse. In a world where ingrained sexism is the law of the land, one woman will risk everything to change the rules of the game. Available April 9 on Prime. Also on Hulu.
We found love in a hopeless place: American Honey
Even lost troublemakers from broken homes gotta go somewhere, and Andrea Arnold’s epic of wayward young folk in the South grants them the dignity and compassion needed to make their lives sing with the poetry of cinema. Newcomer Sasha Lane is electric as Star, an 18-year-old from Texas who abandons a gross boyfriend and his two children to sell magazine subscriptions on the road with a troupe of rowdy weirdos led by a surprisingly compassionate (and convincingly rat-tailed) Shia LaBeouf. The film is loaded with dark irony – particularly the fact that the kids make money by selling an outdated print product in a severely depressed economy – but also a good amount of disarmingly sweet sincerity. When Star shines, she does so for us all. Available April 27 on Prime.
Noteworthy selections in bold.
TELEVISION
Available on Prime Tumble Leaf (April 4) American Playboy: Season 1 (April 7) Fortitude: Season 2 (April 14) Bosch: Season 3 (April 21) Thirteen: Season 1 (April 21) Thunderbirds are Go! Season 3 (April 21) Catastrophe: Season 3 (April 28) Animal Kingdom: Season 1 (April 30)
Available for purchase The Real Housewives of Potomac: Season 2 (April 3) Southern Charm: Season 4 (April 4) Archer: Season 8 (April 6) Better Call Saul: Season 3 (April 11) Fargo: Season 3 (April 20)
MOVIES
Available on Prime Almost Famous (April 1) Chaplin (1992) (April 1) Days of Thunder (April 1) Eddie Murphy Raw(April 1) Election (1999) (April 1) Ella Enchanted (April 1) Kiss the Girls (1997) (April 1) Mulholland Falls (April 1) Robocop (April 1) Robocop 2 (April 1) Saturday Night Fever (April 1) Searching for Bobby Fischer (April 1) Sliver (April 1) The Ghost and the Darkness (April 1) There Will Be Blood (April 1) Tommy Boy (April 1) What If (April 1) Hello, My Name Is Doris (April 2) The Last Exorcism (April 4) Precious Cargo (April 4) Barbershop: The Next Cut (April 8) In a World (April 9) The Perfect Match (2016) (April 9) The Handmaiden (April 13) The Love Witch (April 14) American Pastoral (April 21) American Honey (April 27)
Available for rental Office Christmas Party (April 4) Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (April 4) Hidden Figures (April 11)
This is a genuinely unnerving shot and I am not 100% sure why. Is it the composition? The speed of the balloon? The slightly open mouth? The deliberateness of the reveal? It’s good.
In my opinion, the best thing about living in a loud, bustling metropolis like New York City is being able to openly fart when you walk down the street. I believe we all could get back a few minutes (or hours) of our day if we stopped spending so much time clenched in a bathroom stall fiddling with toilet paper to muffle our farts. Because the truth is: Everyone farts, and most people do it 10 to 20 times a day. So why is it so taboo for people to make absolutely no effort to hold in or muffle a fart?
We're (almost) cool with nipples being out in the open; and talking about queefing,butt plugs, and anal sex is basically dinner table conversation — but for some reason, farts are still so wrong, especially for women. When Jim Carrey farts in Dumb and Dumber it's a funny party trick, but when SJP farts in Sex & The City, she flees from bed and flits around the room with embarrassment. These might sound like dated references, but even in Broad City, an arguably raunchy and progressive show, the male characters do the farting.
The world is just now calming down from the shocking reality that women bleed from their vaginas every month, and guess what? They release other things from that general area, too. The time is now to have your gas be heard. Free your farts — trust me, they want out.
The truth, medically speaking, is that farts are a sign that your digestive system is functioning properly, and your intestines are going to town on the food that you ate. How much air you swallow — because you're anxious, drinking a carbonated beverage, or chewing gum — can also impact how gaseous you are, according to the American College of Gastroenterology. So, if you're a human with intestines, who eats food or breathes air, and you pretend you never fart, I think you're lying.
Not to mention, holding in your farts or doing something to limit how they're expelled isn't just stressful, it could be bad for you. Over time, gas builds up in your intestines, which can lead to bloating and abdominal pain, according to the Mayo Clinic. There's a lot of well-meaning advice out there about how you can limit the amount of gas you're making, and it's basically about changing your diet. But, as long as you're feeling okay, isn't it much easier to just let it rip? (Though if you're having prolonged abdominal pain, or if you notice something weird happening with your stools, you should definitely see a doctor.)
Freeing the fart is about being okay with the fact that farts happen, and when they do, it doesn't have to be funny or awkward or anything.
Psychologists have ruminated about why people find farts funny, and the main theories are that it's nervous laughter or people find it hilarious when our bodies show us that we are, in fact, animals. But who really cares, because both explanations are tinged with shame and anxiety. Even kids who barely have control over their bodily functions are raised to believe that farting is a humiliating thing. I have a vivid memory of my entire third grade class turning around to stare at the beast who dared emit noise from her anus (it me).
Farting has also become a sort of litmus test for intimacy between partners, but that's BS in my opinion, because farting doesn't have to be a spectator sport. When Mic did an informal survey in 2016, they found that 25.2% of people waited six to 12 months to fart in front of their partner, and 33.3% of people said it's okay to start farting in front of your partner when you're having regular sleepovers. Is it really worth the wait?
Personally, I've never farted in front of my partner (and we've been together for six years), but there was one time in the middle of the night when I heard someone fart. To this day, I'll never know if it was me or him (it was him). I remember feeling victorious that I finally saw one little flatulent flaw, and I could relax. But like I said, it doesn't really matter whether or not you fart in front of your partner (or anyone, for that matter) — freeing the fart is about being okay with the fact that farts happen, and when they do, it doesn't have to be funny or awkward or anything.
We all deserve a safe place to pass gas, whether that's on the street, in a bathroom stall, or at a party. It's going to happen at some inopportune moment, so we might as well be in control of how we react. As for the embarrassment? That'll pass, too.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
Like, a “Let’s ruin a basic party dress by shoving an office blouse under it” thing? Is this a trend that’s happening now? Because far be it for us to stand in the way of these things, but we’re gonna have to say no, that is not and should not be a thing.
But the shoes are FABULOUS. We suspect she realizes it and that’s why she’s posing to beat the band.
[Photo Credit: Ian West/PA Images/INSTARimages.com]
Mandy Moore has been spending the past few months making America sob on This Is Us, but while Moore's most recent title may be TV actress, it's hardly the only hat she's worn during her time in the public eye. Though it may seem like another lifetime ago (and, in a way, wasn't it?) Moore first got on the world's radar as a bubblegum pop sensation. The 15-year-old's single "Candy" earned her plenty of radio play (which is probably why I still have this track stuck in my head) as well as something else: a gig opening for *NSYNC.
While Moore hasn't given up on music (her This Is Us character Rebecca is also a singer, and that's no coincidence) like her old pal Justin Timberlake, her music is much different than it was during her '90s days. Also different? Her look. Moore just shared a throwback pic of her with one-time tourmate Timberlake, and it's literally too '90s for words. Moore wrote on Instagram:
"Summer of 1999. Abercrombie tshirts and bucket hats. Opening for this guy and his band. Look at my nervous smile! #tbt #memories"
It's crazy to think that Moore once rocked the same ultra-blonde hue that so many of her fellow female pop stars donned at the time. As for Timberlake, we're not quite so sure what his hair looked like, considering it's covered up by what is the second most heinous bucket hat I've ever seen. (The first is a bucket hat I personally wore during a trip to North Carolina circa 2002.)
This isn't the first throwback picture that Moore has posted recently. Last week she shared this photo of her face on a bus, seemingly from that very same tour:
Both Moore and Timberlake have come so far in their careers, and in their respective fashion choices... But I'm okay with being reminded of where they came from.
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
It’s been a tough year for a lot of people, but especially for jeans. And really, what did jeans do to deserve it? Jeans didn’t cause the election. Jeans didn’t ban people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US and promise to roll back climate change policies. If you asked jeans what a “Brexit” is, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. They’re jeans.
Yet for whatever reason, fashion, and society in general, is taking out its collective frustration on jeans. Below, a list of all the sins committed against jeans in 2017 so far — and reminder: we’re literally only in March.
Giving Them Mullets
The whole “business in the front, party in the back” thing didn’t work on Kate Gosselin’s hair, and it doesn’t work on jeans, either. But Vetements tried. Hoo boy, did they try, and now “step hem jeans” are an inescapable nightmare in which we all must exist.
Shredding the Living Daylights Out of Them
I can only assume that somewhere, some jeans designer owned a particularly rabid and ill-supervised German Shepherd who confused a pair of jeans with a plaything, and that’s how this omnipresent fringe hem thing got started.
Getting Rid of the Waistband As If We Don’t Badly Need It
Of all the things to remove on a pair of jeans, WHY THE WAISTBAND? WE NEED THAT PART. Y’KNOW, TO LIKE, HOLD THEM UP?!???!
Making Two Jeans Into a Single Jean
Imagine looking down at someone’s pants, only to realize that about a fifth of the way down, they magically turn into... different pants? “HAHAHAHHAH GOT YOU!!!!!!” said literally nobody.
Shoving Plastic Inserts in Them
Much was made of the Topshop jeans with Plexiglass-like panels in the knees, and yet among all the noise, the central question has gone unanswered: why.
Turning Them Into Literal Mops
Recommended uses for these $310 jeans include: a) sweeping your apartment, and b) placing them in a time capsule to explain to future people how fucking weird the year 2017 was.
Slashing Them in the Butt
I get it, jeans typically cover both your legs and your ass because of Puritans, probably, and sometimes you only want your jeans to cover one of those things. But folks: There is a better way. It is called “shorts.”
Almost Cutting Them Into Shorts, and Then Deciding Not To
Speaking of shorts, these Boohoo jeans remind me of that one time when I was 14 and thought I had the mental, physical, emotional, and creative capability to cut my Gap jeans into jorts. Halfway through, I realized that hahahahhaha no. I didn’t.
Adding a Tulle Skirt for Unclear Reasons
This isn’t what we meant when we said we wanted “dressy jeans.”
Adding a Jean Skirt for Possibly Even Weirder Reasons
I love a denim skirt as much as the next early 2000s nostalgic, but maybe let’s just pick one and stick to it? Eh? No? Okay.
This?
I literally don’t even know what I’m looking at. Are these... buckets? Made of jeans?
Just Saying ‘Fuck It’ and Turning Them Inside Out
Finally, and most egregiously of all, the Kardashian-beloved brand Unravel Projects evidently just looked around, shrugged, turned a pair of jeans inside out, and sold them for $669. But probably the most shocking part of this image isn’t the horrific exposed pockets, but the fact that these jeans are LOW IN STOCK. WHO IS BUYING THESE JEANS? SHOW YOURSELVES!!!!
Here’s the menu for Poe’s Taco Cielo at The Lower Depths, launching Monday, April 3
The Lower Depths (476 Commonwealth Ave., Boston) is undergoing a transformation, as Boston Magazine reported, and it means that the Kenmore Square bar’s popular tater tot options are being supplanted by a taco-filled menu that launches this Monday, April 3, courtesy of Brian Poe, Gordon Wilcox, and Suzi Samowski. (The trio is also behind the Cambridge location of Bukowski Tavern, and Poe and Wilcox run The Tip Tap Room in Beacon Hill. Poe and Wilcox were also part of the team behind Poe’s Kitchen at the Rattlesnake, which shuttered in November after 26 years. There, Poe served up a Mexican- and Southwestern-inspired menu, including a variety of fun tacos.)
[Update, 3/2/17: After hearing the desperate please of tater tot lovers around the city, Poe has apparently decided to keep them on the menu after all — and he’s working on a tot taco, too.]
While no renovations are planned to The Lower Depths, it’s getting a new name to go with the new menu: Poe’s Taco Cielo at The Lower Depths. “Cielo” is Spanish for “heaven.”
Take a peek at the full menu below, which centers around six tacos, some on flour tortillas and some on corn tortillas. As for beverages, the giant beer list remains in place.
Provided
Poe’s Taco Cielo at The Lower Depths opening menu
Get out of the pre-motorboating position, I wasn’t talking about that kind of glorious bronze bust.
If Eric Trump got a Hitler youth haircut, had his face lipo’d by a de-licensed back alley plastic surgeon, huffed so much helium that his eyes went all Parasite Hilton and got sprayed down by the same fake tan diarrhea that his dad gets sprayed down with, he would look like this bust of Cristiano Ronaldo.
That shit looks like Sloth from Goonies if Sloth from Goonies went on a public access television reboot of The Swan. Yes, that thing looks like it’s high on bath salts and is going to eat my face cheek off, but with that said, I am happy that my favorite sculptor, the artiste who did the iconic Scary Lucy statue, got more work. That’s what who made that bust, right?
There’s already one Crispy Ronaldo statue (complete with a bronze boner) in his hometown of Funchal, Madeira in Portugal, but there can never be enough Crispy statutes in Funchal, especially one that is that horrifyingly hilarious. Today, the local airport in Funchal was renamed the Cristiano Ronaldo International Airport, and at the ceremony, they unveiled a bronze bust that’s supposed to be of him. That wreck puts the bust in BUSTED, but I see what the officials at the Crispy Airport did.
They knew that Crispy Ronaldo’s deep fried ego would explode from having an international airport named after him, so they brought him down to earth with a “Cristiano Ronaldo” bust that looks like a zombiefied and roided-up Scott Caan after getting hit in the face with a wrecking ball. But I will say that the bust’s shiny bronze complexion is spot-on.
Here’s Crispy with his bust. On the right is me in my Grindr picture, and on the left is me when I show up to the trick’s house in person:
I do have to hand it to Crispy for being so calm and keeping it professional when he saw that bust’s raggedy eyebrow situation. Those eyebrows look like they haven’t been touched by a tweezer or a wax strip in at least 6 hours. You know that in the middle of the night Crispy is going to tip toe into the airport with a chisel to fix that thing’s brows. Because messed-up brows are just unacceptable!
An interview with Kate Wagner, the ugly-house blogger.
To fully appreciate McMansion Hell — Kate Wagner’s biting and hilarious blog skewering those “ugly houses that became ubiquitous before (and after) the bubble burst” — one needs to understand McMansions. To understand McMansions, one needs look no further than Wagner’s McMansion scale, aka the 10 Circles of McMansion Hell. The graphic is representative of the blog as a whole: aesthetically lo-fi, but thoroughly considered; accessible to laypeople, but clearly created by someone read up in architectural theory.
courtesy of Kate Wagner / McMansion Hell
Wagner is a 23-year-old grad student researching acoustics at Johns Hopkins. Anyone familiar with her blog — primarily real estate listings annotated with her chastening commentary — will recognize the colloquial efficiency of the categorizations she’s created. For the sixth circle of McMansion Hell: “House is ok, garage is not.” Circles eight through ten: “More roof than house.” Circles seven through ten: the all-caps “TURRET.” (Turrets, like columns, excessive roof lines, and illogical windows are common objects of Wagner’s disdain.)
I got Wagner on the phone and talked about the driving (angry) passion behind McMansion Hell — where her interest began, how these houses became ubiquitous, and why she’s totally fine with tearing them apart.
courtesy of Kate Wagner / McMansion Hell
Tell me a bit about the background of McMansion Hell.
Kate Wagner: I started the blog in July 2016, basically because there weren’t really any good ugly house blogs. I didn’t think anybody was going to pay any attention, but then I wrote this piece on the blog called Why McMansions Are Bad Architecture and it kind of went viral. I don’t know how, but it did, and then suddenly I started getting tens of thousands of people following my Tumblr. I’m in the middle of putting together a book proposal and working as a writer for several other publications, so this sort of kickstarted a career for me, which is really awesome, honestly. I’m really grateful that it happened.
It seems, as a reader, that an important factor of your success is that you’re obviously really knowledgeable about what you’re talking about. You’re able to point out, to people like me who might not know why these houses are so off-putting, what exactly makes this kind of architecture and design bad. That’s something you study, right?
KW: I study architectural acoustics at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins. My thesis is a taxonomy of concert halls. I’m trying to get a PhD so I can write a book about concert halls.
Have you always been interested in architecture and the functionality of design?
KW: Yeah, ever since I was a little kid. I rode the bus in North Carolina — in Southern Pines, which is about an hour south of Raleigh — and my sister and I were the first ones to get on the bus at 6:30 in the morning, and the last to get off in the afternoon. The whole time I was looking at houses and trying to picture the lives of people who came out, trying to see how the houses were different from each other, and being really fascinated with the ones that were a little funny looking. I was an HGTV junkie as a kid. I loved watching Candice Olsen on “Divine Design”; I was always really into “House Hunters.” I started writing about postmodern architecture in high school, for classes but also privately. That was the easiest way for me to get into architectural theory. Now my horizons are a lot broader, but honestly, reading Learning From Las Vegas in high school was what got me interested in the idea of writing about architecture from a theory standpoint.
The blog is so funny, but there is real, evident anger behind it. What bothers you about what you’re seeing?
KW: First of all, I hate the wastefulness of it. You don’t need that much space. These houses are just so horribly constructed; they’re huge energy sinks, part of a completely unsustainable lifestyle, which is also driven by the car and the isolation of suburbia and exurbia.
Then, the pretentiousness of it. It’s appropriating architectural languages of the past, like certain types of columns, in order to denote an appeal to authority, architecturally. By putting columns on your front door, it’s saying you have the same amount of power as an institution like a bank or government office. We’ve codified certain symbols as symbols of wealth. But that started a long time ago, and it’s a whole other can of worms. Now, though, the cheapness of the material — there’s an irony there for me. It’s making this bold statement of wealth, but you can’t afford to do it with good stuff.
Also just the roof lines bother me the most. [Laughs.] They make no sense, and they’re huge, and they’re at so many different pitches, and anyone who knows anything about roofs knows the more complicated the roofs are, the more likely they are to leak. Can you imaging re-roofing a house like that, after ten or twelve years? It would cost more than buying a new house.
courtesy of Kate Wagner / McMansion Hell
Looking through the pictures on your posts, you start to realize how consistent these markers are. Like, I’d never noticed how many windows are on these houses. How could you need so many windows? What are some of the elements you see again and again?
KW: Usually the roof lines are the number one. The windows not matching, or there being too many windows, or windows in illogical places. That’s pretty common. The use of foam architectural detailings. I don’t know how trendy this stuff is; it was pretty trendy in the 2000s, but some of it has gone a little out of style. Vinyl siding is pretty much out of style now, but that was a marker.
I honestly think it’s the size of the houses. The two-story entryway. They’re not scaled at all to the human being. For me to stand in front of this house would make me feel so small, and I think that’s part of the point. They’re not homey, because they’re just so huge.
All of these things are sort of codified throughout the blog. I devised a scale of how McMansion-y something is based on certain architectural features, as a way to taxonomize. That no one has really done so is interesting to me. I wouldn’t say it’s vernacular architecture — which is designed and built by the people who would use it — because there are huge corporations, lots of industry, money, lobbying involved. But it is uneducated. There’s so much American housing that hasn’t been studied in any sort of academic way, and of course the blog is not the way to examine that, but it’s part of a greater research project of mine, which is to document the changes in American housing in the last 40 years, architecturally and economically and sociologically.
The tagline of the blog describes these homes as coming before the bubble burst. Can you talk a little about the economic environment that led to this surge of McMansions?
KW: I think the financial crisis and McMansions — there’s no causation. It’s all correlation. When markets are good, people build houses that are huge. That’s why the average housing square footage has gone up yet again this year. When markets are good, people buy huge houses, and they’re not going to stop until that way of life is no longer sustainable financially, which means we run out of oil.
What happened with the financial crisis is that because of the riskiness of the loans that were being lent at the time, you saw more people borrowing more money than they could afford, to build houses that were too big for what they needed. They were risky assets the entire time.
You’ve looked at different countries on the blog, but this aesthetic does kind of feel specific to the U.S. Is that real, or do I just think that because I’m here?
KW: I’m only now starting to study the McMansions of other countries because there’s so much to study in my own country that I could never run out of material, but I think the main differences are in size. In Canada, the house are just a little smaller. They’re still ugly and stupid, but they’re not quite as huge. Australia, for at least a couple years, had larger house sizes than the U.S. But also it’s hard to navigate the real estate listings there so it’s hard for me to get a bigger picture of the what the average is for those areas. Since I haven’t been to those places, I can’t get as good of a feel of how their suburban landscape is different from ours. But I plan on visiting eventually.
courtesy of Kate Wagner / McMansion Hell
Could you identify states here that are the worst offenders?
KW: Oh yeah. If I’m just like, oh, I need to find a good McMansion right now, my go-to places are northern Virginia, southern Maryland, the D.C. suburbs. New Jersey — all of it. The whole thing. I find some pretty heinous ones in the southeast in general. Marietta, Georgia, is particularly horrible. Colorado’s pretty bad. Texas, always. Texas ’til the end of time.
That makes sense, everything bigger in Texas.
KW: Texas is particularly horrible.
Have you had to deal with angry or offended readers?
KW: I’m still waiting for someone to be like, “That’s my house!” but no one has yet.
That’s good.
KW: No one’s ever even been like, “You’re wrong. I hate this, and you’re wrong.” Which is hilarious, because I totally expected that to happen, since the internet is evil.
You are in a sort of rare position to not be getting hate for something you’re doing on the internet — which is probably a good sign. Do you ever feel bad, though, about tearing apart these places which has been or will someday be someone’s home? Or is it more like, listen, make a better house and I won’t make fun of it.
KW: It’s not like it’s a witch hunt. I’ll include the city or the county, but I never link to the real estate listing. I try to be vague about the square footage and the price so people can’t just look it up. I try to give them privacy in that way. But I think that I don’t particularly feel bad because the people who build these houses obviously have enough wealth where they don’t really need to care, honestly. I don’t want to be deciding factor between someone buying a house or not buying a house, but at the same time, these houses are so exorbitant and so stupid that I feel like they’ve already been sitting on the market forever, and nothing I say is going to change the fact that they’re not really wanted. They’re just so huge and so expensive and so bad. But also I just don’t feel bad at all, really. (Laughs.) There’s a reason I don’t crap all over apartment complexes, because people live where they can afford to live. But at a certain point you’re not living where you can afford to live; you’re living in excess.
courtesy of Kate Wagner / McMansion Hell
Do you see a reversal in the trend? It feels like people are embracing minimalism, but that might just be my own urban bubble.
KW: In architecture, yeah. You see the tiny house trend, and younger people tend to do less. I read somewhere that my generation and the generation before care more about experiences than assets. Their idea of having a good life is doing things like traveling and living in the city rather than having a huge house and a nice car and all of the things that for so long was the sort of American ideal. Technology also changes things. When you live in a world with such pervasive technology, which in some ways is erasing borders, there’s no room for tribalism or any of the things that keep us locked in one place. So I think minimalism is definitely appealing to the financial situations of young people who are saddled with debt, or it’s appealing to people who get more from doing things than from having things.
But still, people ask me all the time if the McMansion is going to die, and I know Business Insider wants it to die so bad and I appreciate them, but it’s not. Fewer people are buying old, but more people are building new. That’s sort of what’s emerged as the trend.
There will always be people who want a huge house.
KW: For a lot of people, their idea of personal wealth and success is a huge house. Is there something wrong with that? I’m a super environmentalist, so I would say yes, of course there’s something inherently wrong with having and creating this huge waste of space. But at the same time, it’s still somebody’s home. If that’s their dream, then that’s their dream. I’m not going to insult that person specifically; that’s why I make up characters. But no, it’s not going to die until that way of life is unsustainable, until people literally cannot afford to live that way. And the only way that can happen is if we run out of oil. Or Florida falls off into the ocean.
Inside McMansion Hell was originally published in The Hairpin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The singing belly buttons in Levi’s night terror-summoning Super Low Jeans commercials from 2001!
Who knew that just five words (Remember The Singing Belly Buttons?) in an email subject from a reader could completely dust off a comatose memory stuck in the crevices of my dilapidated brain and immediately make me remember those weird yodeling belly buttons in a Levi’s commercial? Back in the early-aughts when everyone wore their jeans pubes-baring low, Levi’s put out a commercial for Super Low Jeans that starred a chorus of stomach b-holes singing I’m Coming Out. That commercial was the sole reason why some people in the early 2000s stuck a tiny ball gag in their belly buttons. They didn’t want that bitch to get any ideas and start singing to them.
The ad was directed by Michel Gondry (director of many, many music videos and the Oscar-winning mastermind behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (aka Meadow Soprano) did the singing for those belly buttons. The ad was ten parts bizarre and five parts terrifying. We’re all the boy in the commercial who is wondering if he somehow ended up in a Wes Craven horror movie or if one of the ingredients in the juice he had with lunch was LSD.
When ass-less jeans finally happen in the mainstream and Levi’s puts out their own version, they can team up with Michel Gondry again and do a commercial starring yodeling b-holes. It wouldn’t be the first time a singing asshole was used to sell jeans.
There is a pervasive trend in modern movie trailers you are undoubtedly familiar with by now: the solemn, slow cover of a very famous, well-regarded song. In the more recent, and perhaps most egregious, example, Warner Bros.’ new Geostorm trailer features a grim rendition of Louis Armstrong’s classic tune “What a Wonderful World.” The dramatic cover is, of course, meant as a bit of irony, because as you can see, the world depicted in Geostorm is clearly not wonderful: It’s filled with lightning and tornadoes and hail large enough to destroy a city bus.
This trend isn’t new, and it has inspired a lot of passion on both the pro and the anti side of the conversation. But now feels like the time to recognize that overly obvious elegiac covers have jumped the shark, which is also something awesome that seems like it might happen in Geostorm. As we call time of death, accompanied by a dour version of “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” please revisit the single highlight and extreme lowlights of the serious, and often seriously sardonic, trend.
50 Shades of Grey trailer + Beyoncé’s sexier “Crazy in Love” cover
Beyoncé’s slow, sexy cover of “Crazy in Love” for the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack served as both a high-water mark and a harbinger of covers to come. The standards are slightly different here though: It’s her song, after all. It’s the standard by which all moody covers should be judged, and found lacking.
And now, the lowlights:
The Social Network trailer + a choral cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”
Certainly, yes, a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” seemed thematically in order. Because, as explored in The Social Network’s Oscar-winning adapted screenplay, Mark Zuckerberg is a “weirdo” who “doesn’t belong here.” He belongs on Facebook, which he invented.
The Great Gatsby trailer + a cover of the Turtles’ “Happy Together”
In case you were misled by his fabulous lifestyle, Filter’s cover of the Turtles’ “Happy Together” offers a glimpse into the inner life of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby in 2012’s The Great Gatsby. Jay and Daisy are so happy together … OR ARE THEY? No. They are very much not.
Birdman trailer + CeeLo covering his song “Crazy”
CeeLo Green’s slower, edgier version of his own “Crazy” in the Birdman trailer is as on-the-nose as any trailer song in recent history.
Insurgent trailer + a cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”
Oh, you better believe 2015’s teen dystopian action film “Insurgent” also used a cover of “What a Wonderful World.” Clearly, this is a bad world.
Patriots Day trailer + an instrumental cover of “America the Beautiful”
How can an instrumental version of “America the Beautiful” used in the Patriots Day trailer count, you might wonder? Have you listened to how slow it is? It is in the slowness that you will understand.
Power Rangers trailer + a cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line”
Halsey’s cover of Johnny Cash “I Walk the Line” is lovely, but actually works against our understanding of the film. What line? The line between being a Power Ranger and not? Are the Power Rangers themselves the line? The line between us and space freaks?
A Cure for Wellness Trailer + a cover of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”
By 2017, the level of irony has broken down completely. If the Ramones had recorded a song entitled “I Wanna Be Put in a Tank Filled With Eels and Also Maybe Become an Eel From the Looks of Things,” a cover of that song that would have been in The Cure for Wellness trailer. Please, let us finally put this trend to bed, maybe while a creepy, breathy female voice sings a cover of, let’s see, how about, Billy Joel’s “Lullabye.”
While San Francisco properties are getting smaller and denser, one must stand in awe of the audacity of one property owner’s decision to meld the kitchen and bathroom into one space.
A microwave and kitchen sink literally sit next to an enclosed shower and toilet. This raises many, many questions. First, the validity of the photos. The image was sent in by a tipster—and since NextDoor limits to posts by neighborhood, Curbed SF has been unable to verify if they appeared on the website, or if they have been altered in any way. Curbed SF has contacted the owner of the property for comment. We will update as soon as we hear back from them
But supposing this mind-boggling room is real, here are a few other questions:
Is this legal? Answer: No, it is not.
Is it safe? Possibly not.
Is it healthy? Microscopic waste particles do launch into the air post-flush, so that is one concern. “Fecal plumes could pose a problem, especially if you’re prone to flushing with the toilet seat up,” says Elizabeth Lopatto, science editor at The Verge. (Here’s more onthat dirtysubject.)
Where is this located? According to the ad, which was posted on NextDoor, this newly renovated studio apartment is near the Presidio Wall between Presidio Heights and Cow Hollow.
How much? According to the ad, $2,000/month or best offer.
Here are some additional images of the tiny home. Enjoy.
Under what possible circumstances would you wear this?
Sorry, addendum: Under what possible circumstances, other than being Ciara, would you wear this?
Is $16 a reasonable price for this? Would any dollars be a reasonable price for this?
Why does the model look so smug?
What does this combination of words, culled from the product description, even mean: “the coolest layered look featuring a crop neck?”
Where’s the line here? Like, at what point does an “extreme crop” become so extremely cropped that it just…disappears? Is all air an extreme crop? Are we the extreme crop???
HOW IN THE SWEET MOTHER OF BRANDY MELVILLE CAN A NECK BE CROPPED?
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