Amanda Mull

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Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.
The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster.

Last night, the shopping app Temu, which is not quite a year and a half old, ran its second Super Bowl ad in as many years. It was hard to miss, because the same ad appeared several times, including following the game-winning touchdown. By most estimates, the three times the ad was featured in the middle of gameplay would have cost an eye-watering $21 million alone.

Last year, a funny thing happened at Ring Concierge’s Manhattan showroom. A bride-to-be brought her engagement ring back to the popular jewelry store after wearing it for a few weeks and wanted to trade out her diamond for a worse one. The woman was worried that the original rock was too clear, too bright, too perfect for its large size, Ring Concierge’s CEO, Nicole Wegman, told me. She wanted to replace it with a lower-quality stone of a similar size—something a little less bright white.

When you’re shopping around for something on Amazon, you’re probably hoping to end up with a product that is good enough. Many of the site’s stock images and product descriptions have an unpredictable relationship to the objects you’ll actually receive; to guard against surprises, you frequently need to peruse the ratings and reviews left by the shoppers who came before you.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.Earlier this year, while waiting for the subway, I encountered one of the most revolting pairs of shoes I’ve ever seen on the feet of a fellow commuter. They were the unholy spawn of a Gucci loafer and an Adidas sneaker.

There’s no such thing as a smart sports bet, but the first one I ever made was, by any measure, particularly stupid. It was late January 2022, and mobile-gaming apps had become legal in New York only a few weeks earlier. I had successfully ignored all of them until I saw Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, walk into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the AFC Championship game wearing a sherpa coat, black turtleneck, huge gold chain, and rimless sunglasses.

When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall.

With sincere apologies, I need to ask you to imagine yourself arriving at the airport. Freshly expelled from whatever mode of transport brought you there, you are probably at least a little bit harried. Maybe you’re running late or you’re wrangling small children. Maybe you are weighed down by an overstuffed tote bag and a roll-aboard that could burst at any moment because you are opposed in principle to paying $50 to check a bag.

In 1994, Charmaine Simmons, the costume supervisor for Seinfeld, had a problem: People wanted to dress like Kramer, Jerry’s eccentric, ever-interrupting neighbor, played by Michael Richards. This was one of the better problems a television series could have: Seinfeld was the most popular show on American television that year, and its idiosyncratic style and humor had started to influence pop culture far beyond its Thursday-night time slot. But the problem existed nevertheless.

In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines.

Updated at 9:30 p.m. ET on June 28, 2023When you order something online, getting that thing from the warehouse into your hot little hands is hard. Internet commerce is designed to obscure that difficulty—packages are supposed to alight on your welcome mat as though dropped there by the delivery fairy—but challenges persist, and they are only getting worse. There are just too many doorsteps, and too many things that need to alight on them.

The Instant Pot is, by all indications, a perfectly good machine—maybe even a great one. The IP, as the device is known to its many devotees, is a kitchen gadget in the most straightforward sense of the term: It’s a classic labor-saver, promising to turn ingredients into family meals while you clean up, tend to your kids, and do all of the other things you could be doing instead of keeping an eye on the stove.

If you’ve ever purchased a pair of faux-leather sandals without realizing they were faux, the sandals probably cleared up that misunderstanding for you pretty quickly. Both real and fake leather can shred your feet on first meeting, but the real stuff will eventually stretch, bend, soften, and mold itself to your needs. Faux leather, meanwhile, is more likely to remind you why it has long had the derogatory moniker of pleather. It’s plastic, which doesn’t really break in.

Nearly half a decade has elapsed since I last worked in the fashion industry, but one thing from my previous career remains a compulsion to this day: I look at people’s purses. In the brain space that might otherwise be occupied by dear childhood memories or the dates and times of future doctor appointments, I tend to an apparently undeletable mental spreadsheet of who is carrying what. Bottega Veneta Cassette, green padded leather, Soho, 20-something woman.

My mom has been warning me that I’m going to ruin my feet for almost as long as I’ve been able to walk. She has her reasons: I spent much of my childhood refusing to wear shoes more substantial than soccer slides. In high school, she wouldn’t buy me high heels, so I got an after-school job and bought them myself. During college, I added slipperlike ballet flats and Ugg boots to my repertoire.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page.

Although it may be difficult to imagine a universe in which George Clooney needs a little help charming women, that’s the case in Up in the Air, the 2009 movie in which he plays a frequent-flying HR consultant in charge of executing mass layoffs.

In Mexico City, there is an airy, sun-filled restaurant called Contramar that offers a whole grilled snapper, flayed and then smeared with red chilis on one side, and green herbs on the other. The fish arrives on a minimalist wooden plate, surrounded by a series of small accouterments—sliced limes; tortillas; silky-smooth black beans; a shallow bowl of creamy, verdant sauce that looks like it was probably made with avocado.

Two months ago, I received a text describing a situation that I could see immediately and with full clarity in my mind’s eye. “All these guys on this bachelor party brought their own Yetis,” my friend David wrote. “We have seven Yetis for ten people.” The party was at a house on Lake Norman, in North Carolina, and although the Yeti-to-bro ratio was later revised down to six Yetis for 12 bros, my vision for what was happening was clear. Sun. Boats. Beers.

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet.

As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls.

When I think of a sit-up, my mind flashes immediately to the (carpeted, for some reason) floor of my elementary-school gym. Twice a week, our teachers marched us there for ritual humiliation and light calisthenics, and under the watchful gaze of a former football coach with a whistle perpetually dangling from his lips, we’d warm up with the moves we’d been told were the building blocks of physical fitness—jumping jacks, push-ups, toe touches, and, of course, sit-ups.

Keeping an infant fed is a precarious task in the best of circumstances, and for many American parents, the circumstances have become quite bad. Nutritional formulas are currently in very short supply across the United States, and in some markets, more than half of all products are out of stock. For babies with medical conditions, as well as older kids and adults whose lives similarly depend on access to specialty nutritional formulas, the situation is nearing catastrophe.

In the foreword to her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman offered a warning to people with simplistic ideas about what life was like in the medieval world, and what that might say about humanity as a whole: You think you know, but you have no idea.The period, which spans roughly 500 to 1500, presents some problems for people trying to craft uncomplicated stories.

If you tried to imagine the perfect gym teacher, you’d probably come up with someone a lot like Hampton Liu. He’s a gentle, friendly guy who spends most of his time trying to figure out how to make the basics of exercise more approachable, and he talks frequently about how he never wants anyone to feel shame for their ability or skill level.

This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 2. If you’ve never seen an episode of Love Is Blind, the best way I can describe the viewing experience is this: It feels like a television producer read a Wikipedia description of the Stanford prison experiment and decided that all it needed was a little romance.

When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

In 1993, a SWAT team equipped with night-vision goggles and assault rifles surrounded Mel Gibson’s mansion under the cover of darkness. They burst into the home, eventually finding the movie star wearing a bathrobe in his kitchen. Gibson put his hands up and the agents cuffed him immediately, over protestations that he had done nothing wrong, and certainly nothing dangerous. His crime? The possession of vitamin C tablets.