Need a Distraction?

There’s an old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s intended as a dig at music criticism, but beneath that, there’s a deeper truth: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s universal yet still deeply personal. And while science and math are involved in its creation, there is something undeniably mystical about it.

Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and someone who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for decades — though, last year, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.

In this world, there are divorced men (fact) and men who are the most divorced (derogatory).

Men who marry will be divorced or they won’t. Men can also divorce and remarry, or divorce and remarry and divorce again, over and over, as many times as their hearts desire. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 33 percent of straight men who have ever been married have also been divorced, and the older a man gets, the more likely it is he will have been divorced at some point.

While making a grilled cheese the other day, a question popped into my mind: Why is cheese often yellow even though milk is white?

Of course, this isn’t entirely true across the (cheese) board — cheese comes in a remarkable range of colors, from pale white to deep yellow-orange. Take cheddar, for instance — it can be found in both shades. So which color is the “real” cheese?

The ocean is full of strange creatures. The parrotfish is no exception.

Its teeth are fused into a sharp beak, giving it a birdlike appearance. It’s hermaphroditic, changing sex partway through its life. And to sleep, some parrotfish engulf themselves in a mucus cocoon.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.

My grandmother had a teenage pregnancy she hid from her family before giving birth in secret and immediately giving the child up for adoption after birth. I accidentally discovered this after I received a message on an ancestry DNA website from someone closely related genetically to me. She told me she knew barely anything about her birth parents and was desperate to just have an answer. I accidentally exposed this secret to my mother and grandmother by asking if anyone knew who this person who messaged me was.

“Chicken nuggets are a food I have never fed my kids,” TikTok creator @thehealthywife says as she carefully places raw chicken breasts into a food processor, in a video from this spring that got more than 50,000 likes. “That’s because I prioritize their health over convenience.”

That means making nugget-like chicken snacks from scratch, no matter how messy or time-consuming it may be. As she measures out scoops of pulverized chicken meat, dredges them in her own breading mixture, and fries them in schmaltz, she’s acting out one of the biggest contradictions in contemporary food culture: Americans love chicken nuggets, and we hate ourselves for buying them, eating them, and serving them to our kids.

If there’s one word that’s most associated with Gen Alpha right now, it might be “brainrot.”

According to countless trend pieces and innumerable TikToks, kids from this generation, born between 2010 and 2024, have purportedly “rotted” their brains by scrolling too much on their devices.

If you’re a regular on TikTok or Instagram, you may feel your kitchen is under attack.

It started with #CleanTok, wherein cleanliness influencers shared tips for sparkling stainless steel sinks and competed to have the most hygienic kitchen. Then, influencers got more ambitious with “decanting” videos documenting a method of pantry organization involving transferring foodstuffs from the grocery store packaging to clear containers in neat rows.

This story was translated by Ruxandra Guidi. Quiere leer esta historia en español? Haga clic aquí.

Night had fallen in Cabo Rojo, a wildlife refuge along Puerto Rico’s southwestern coast, by the time we started our hike. Insects hummed from the grasses, green lizards slept in the trees, and resting water birds, spooked by our approaching footsteps, squawked and flew away.