The Beauty Myth: What Keeps Us From Seeing Ourselves Clearly?
“What I look like” is not a static picture cut out and placed in different environments, but one that changes again and again.
Angela Chen is a senior editor at Wired Magazine and the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, which was named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR, Electric Literature, and Them. Her reporting and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, Paris Review, Lapham's Quarterly, and more.
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Writing a Book About Asexuality Taught Me to Look for a Fate Beyond Numbers
I learned to reevaluate the meaning of ‘normal’ in relationships, and also my habit of reflexively turning to data.
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It can be easy to confuse real emotion with the shiny drama enfolding it. Sometimes grand gestures are signs of grand feeling—sometimes they’re not.
On Being Young, Scrappy, and (Sometimes) Satisfied
Remain forever hungry, or enjoy the tried-and-true? Sometimes, I learned, it’s okay to double down on the life you have.
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Can Desire or Love Be Predicted?
Data versus the real world: what compatibility algorithms can’t tell you.
The Downside of Radical Honesty
The problem with radical honesty is that we are not transparent to ourselves—we are always biased, and so is the feedback we provide.