DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: May 10, 2026

The Right-Wing Magazine’s “Sex Issue”:

Every few years or so, the Christian right takes another pass at the impossible task of making fundamentalism look sexy or cool. These efforts tend to end in failure: Dorky youth ministers wearing clothes that are 10 years out of date while assuring their young charges that sex is better if you wait for marriage. Christian rock concerts full of sheltered teenagers. Glossy youth magazines with fashion and dating advice that falls short of its secular counterparts.

Evie Magazine is the latest iteration of these long-standing efforts to sell fundamentalism to young people with “hip” packaging. The young women’s magazine has admittedly been more successful than its predecessors, mostly due to what seems like a large infusion of cash that allows both its website and print edition to ape the expensive look of its worldly competitors, like Teen Vogue or Cosmopolitan. In its seven years of existence, Evie has strived to escape the cringeworthy reputation of evangelical youth culture by featuring scantily-clad models and even risqué content — which is supposed to be for married women only.

But even by these standards, their newly released “Sex” issue is surprising. At first blush, it’s hard to even believe it’s meant to push traditional gender roles on women. The cover features a bride in wedding-night lingerie, and the contents are positively NC-17: illustrations of naked couples copulating, how-to manuals for performing oral sex, bodice ripper-style descriptions of sexual intercourse and full-page photographs of models in suggestive poses, like eating cherries or drinking open-mouthed from a hose. Old-school religious conservatives would be appalled, and in fact, many complained on Evie’s Instagram page that the magazine, which is published by Gabriel Hugoboom and Brittany Martinez, a husband and wife team, had gone too far.

Make no mistake: Despite the lurid illustrations and eye-popping $49 cover price, the intended audience for the “Sex” issue, which is only available in print, is virgins — and likely teenage virgins. They would be the only people naive enough to buy the fantasy in issue’s pages, of waiting until marriage to have sex and then immediately descending into a lifetime of erotic bliss with Prince Charming. My copy arrived early this week, and after my initial astonishment at how graphic the language was, I quickly realized that the magazine’s ideas about sex and relationships nonetheless resemble the “True Love Waits” nonsense from the 90s and early aughts rather than anything recognizable to a sexually active adult.

Evie’s “Sex” issue is not a useful guide on the art of, well, sex. Instead, it’s propaganda, meant to sell a young, inexperienced audience on the idea that being a submissive wife in a traditional marriage is an erotically-charged and sexually-fulfilling lifestyle. The magazine is clever about concealing its agenda. The words “Christian” or “religious” are carefully avoided in favor of euphemisms like “traditional.” Instead of scolding the reader about the alleged evils of premarital sex, abstaining until marriage is simply (and falsely) presented as the cultural norm. The use of terms like “men” and “women” is scant; the magazine mostly refers to “husbands” and “wives,” as if sexual contact outside of heterosexual matrimony is so rare as to barely rate a mention. In 21st-century America, it’s exceedingly rare for women to be virgins on their wedding day. But inside the “Sex” issue, it’s just assumed that a woman’s wedding night will be her sexual initiation.

One thing the article doesn’t mention:

There’s little mention of pregnancy or childbirth in the “Sex” issue, which is telling, since a reader who takes their advice seriously is in serious danger of an unwanted pregnancy. The reader is routinely encouraged to avoid hormonal contraception in favor of tracking fertility. Even if done correctly, this is a notoriously ineffective method to prevent pregnancy. But it’s impossible to reconcile with the repeated admonishments in the magazine to have sex with your husband frequently, since fertility tracking only works if one abstains for huge chunks of the month. Abortion is of course not mentioned at all, although realistically, many women who attempt to use the rhythm method may end up calling an abortion provider at some point.

This is where Evie’s manipulative tactics are most discernible. The magazine has a long, ugly history of employing misinformation to scare women out of using contraception, mostly by failing to mention the incredibly high risks of pregnancy that accompany having regular sex without birth control. Reading the “Sex” issue leaves the strong impression that this is part of a larger agenda to lure gullible readers into unintended pregnancy.

Hey, form your own conclusions, but I think the titillation is the point to sell magazines, not to discourage teens from abstaining from sex until marriage.

Soylent Shakes–The Post-Food Future?:

Remember Soylent? In the mid-2010s, Soylent promised to change the world by solving a timeless problem: Everybody has to eat. Instead of chopping vegetables or defrosting a meal, you could fertilize yourself, like a needy rhododendron, with a blend of oat flour, maltodextrin, brown-rice protein, canola oil, fish oil, and just enough sucralose to mask the flavor. For a brief moment, Soylent was beloved—at least in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists helped turn it into a $170 million brand. It was also a dystopian punch line: What if you stripped life of all joy and bottled the result? Ha! In 2023, Soylent was sold off for a fraction of its former valuation.

If you are one of the many Americans who chugs these shakes on the regular, perhaps you might balk at the comparison to Soylent. The point of nonfood nutrition is no longer to fuel yourself so that you can sit at a computer longer. You are instead becoming healthier, hotter, more beautiful, more jacked. The shakes are engineered for our protein-obsessed times. Fairlife’s Nutrition Plan shake, for example, comes with 30 grams of protein in a mere 150 calories. But many of the shakes do not stop at protein. They want to talk to you about adaptogens and your gut health, your antioxidants and your immune-boosting support. Only some of them explicitly identify as a meal replacement. Instead, they are “next-level nourishment” to “fuel every move.” They go from “gym bags to lunchboxes to morning smoothies” and match pace “with your everyday, get-strong hustle.”

The shakes are portable and easy and wildly efficient, in that they deliver a lot of meticulously calibrated individual nutrients and require no thinking. As a person who is not generally doing anything particularly demanding with my body (or, arguably, my time), I know that traditional eating should be just fine. All else being equal, eating food, not too much, mostly plants is probably superior to downing ultra-processed shakes. And still, I find myself drawn to these drinks. Food is fraught and confusing, but the shakes are reassuringly precise: This much protein! This much fiber! These carbohydrates! This unquantifiable but still notable immune-boosting defense! I am, as the protein-shake brand OWYN promises, getting “Only What You Need.” This was, of course, the promise of Soylent: You could glug down everything you needed and get on with it.

A ‘Blue Wave’ Hits The West Coast:

Hundreds of thousands of shimmery, indigo blue sea creatures are washing up along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, captivating beachgoers and scientists with their beauty and biology.

“The ocean is filled with jewels,” but this jellyfish-like creature stands out, said Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The velella velella, or “by-the-wind sailors” as they are commonly known, grab attention not just for their vivid, bluish purple color, but also for their sparkling “sails” that shine like diamonds on the ocean’s surface.

When McCauley walked on to the beach for a great white shark observation project in late April, he was surprised to see the velella stretched along the sand the entire length of the beach. Flotillas of them often come ashore along the Pacific Coast in the spring when offshore winds shift, but recent aggregations along beaches and just offshore have been especially dense along the California coast.

Studies have revealed the velella eat zooplankton, fish eggs and krill, while ocean sunfish called mola mola, one of the ocean’s largest bony fish, have been seen feasting on large flotillas of velella at sea.

Scientists still have much left to learn about the billions of bubble-like shapes, Helm said. They drift and float for thousands of miles on the ocean’s surface, traveling via their triangular-shaped “sail” features that allow ocean winds to push them along, Helm said. “Who else is hanging out with them? Who’s eating them? Where are they eating?”

I couldn’t import the photos, so check out the article to see these amazing creatures.

How ‘Warsh’ Became ‘Wash’.

The pronunciation is part of an American dialect that is losing steam, linguists told NPR. You may also hear it in “Warshington D.C.”

There’s a leading theory among linguists about the origins of that “r”: the migration of Scotch-Irish people to the South Midland U.S. starting at the end of the 18th century. They were a group who moved from Scotland to Northern Ireland, specifically the Ulster province — and they’re known for their use of “strong r’s,” or being “rhotic,” Reed said.

“Those folks were super ‘r-full,'” he said. (Not even I would stoop this low on the pun scale…)

The addition of the new letter stretches across parts of Appalachia, from Baltimore to Southern Ohio, up to Michigan and all the way over to Washington state.

The written version of the pronunciation appears in late 19th century literature. O’Conner and Kellerman, who write the blog “Grammarphobia,” found a paper by the philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The Dialect of West Somerset, read at an 1875 meeting of the Philological Society in London. Elworthy wrote: “I’ve a yeard em zay he don’t make nort of a leg o’ mutton, and half a peck o’ cider to warsh-n down way.”

They also found an 1897 poem about a doctor in Indiana by James Whitcomb Riley reading, “warshed his hands.”

The pronunciation “warsh” makes sense when you break the sounds down. The process is called “coarticulation,” or when one sound changes to be more like the sound next to it, said Dodsworth, the North Carolina State professor. In the case of wash, the “sh” sound influences the vowel before it.

Another reason the “r” could have snuck in is that our lips round for “wah,” “sh” and “rrr,” Dodsworth said. By the time the “sh” sound comes around in the word wash, the tongue is touching the roof of the mouth, and the “r” can slip into the word using the same rounded lips, she said.

One phonetician friend told Reed: “When you speak, you’re basically just moving hunks of meat around in the air.”

“Vowels are naturally squishy, squirrely, movey things because there’s just your tongue in your mouth,” Reed said.

No further explanation is necessary.

“If I Could Spy On The Animals…”:

An innovative new project to continuously monitor thousands of animals at once is getting a boost with a new satellite in space.

Project ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) recently launched the second of two satellites that are crucial to its plan to gather granular data on the whereabouts of wildlife around the globe.

The latest satellite, which is partially funded by the National Geographic Society and carried out of Earth’s orbit by a SpaceX rocket, is the culmination of an idea that started around 20 years ago. As the project’s name indicates, researchers plan to conduct animal research from space. And as the project’s acronym suggests, it’s ambitious.

Should it all go according to plan, scientists may be able to use the data from thousands of tracker-tagged animals to monitor diseases, predict natural disasters, understand how seed-dispersing birds influence forest canopies, keep an eye on poachers, and more.

Cuing Def Leppard: