Lifestyle
The New Yorker Updates Its Style Guide for the Internet Age

This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine had completed a “reëxamination” of its house style.
A few things were changing. But its dedication to the dieresis — those two little dots that float above certain vowels, beloved by New Yorker editors and almost nobody else — was not.
“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming,” Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy department at the magazine, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The magazine, which doesn’t look a day over 100, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Mr. Boynton’s decision to announce changes to the style guide in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter on Monday was noteworthy. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two diereses, three em dashes and four pairs of parentheses.
The magazine will abandon “Web site,” “in-box,” and “Internet” in favor of the more familiar “website,” “inbox” and “internet.” “Cellphone” will be one word, rather than two.
“Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking,” Mr. Boynton wrote in the announcement, providing an example of another new rule: Thoughts will be italicized in an effort to differentiate them from other text.
The keepers of the magazine’s house style have been purposely slow to make concessions to the internet age. “We don’t want to make a change and then change it back,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s a lasting change that is elsewhere in the world and that people are familiar with and comfortable with.”
Potential changes were crowdsourced from a group of current and former editors and copy editors in January at the suggestion of David Remnick, the magazine’s longtime editor. Mr. Boynton and a colleague came up with a list of proposals in February.
He was tight-lipped about which ones had been rejected. “I don’t want them to become, you know, objects of fetishization in the outside world,” he said.
The New Yorker’s style rules provoke strong reactions in the mostly civil realm of grammarians. In opinion pieces and on social media, critics have long accused the magazine of snobbery, inelegance and overzealous use of commas.
They take issue with its doubled consonants in “traveller” and “focussed.” They obsess over its diacritic flourish on “reëlection.” Mr. Boynton once felt the need to mount a defense of the way the magazine punctuates the possessive form of “Donald Trump Jr.” (It requires three punctuation marks in a row.)
Benjamin Dreyer, the retired copy chief of Random House and the author of “Dreyer’s English,” has his quibbles with the magazine’s house style. (For one, he called the Donald Trump Jr. punctuation rule “unspeakably hideous.”) But he praised the most recent round of updates in a phone call on Wednesday.
“I’ve been making a joke for years that you shouldn’t necessarily have a house style that is visible from outer space,” he said. “But that’s what The New Yorker is about: They want to be The New Yorker.”
He said he was relieved the magazine had not done away with diereses. He was happy its editors had stood by its outlier constructions of “teen-ager” and “per cent.” But other updates were long overdue.
“Finally shrinking ‘website’ to a lowercase, single word — I think we did that at Random House, I don’t know, two decades ago?” he said.
The magazine’s writers and editors have so far seemed pleased with the changes, Mr. Boynton said. Plus, he knows they will break whatever rules they cannot stand.
Sometimes he lets them. “That’s something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about The New Yorker,” he said. “For as many rules as we have, we’re making exceptions all the time.”

Lifestyle
The world's largest wildlife crossing is entering Stage 2: What's that mean for traffic?

When you’re trying to build a mountain over one of the country’s busiest freeways, it’s easy to be envious of original creation stories, when natural spaces were formed with just a wave of the hand.
In those stories, there were no overhead wires to bury or water lines to move. There weren’t vehicles to divert, underground creeks that required stabilization, majestic oaks that had to be saved or soils that required inoculation with local microbes.
But such are the looming challenges for the designers and builders of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the world’s largest and most ambitious crossing designed to give wildlife a safe and nature-mimicking passage over the 10-lane 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills.
The crossing structure itself is mostly completed — except the planting, which will happen this fall — but it’s basically a bridge to nowhere right now, squatting over the freeway just west of the Liberty Canyon Drive offramp. (Although — news flash! — even though it’s not connected to the neighboring hills, the first non-insect wildlife was spotted on the bridge last week: a Western fence lizard basking at the top, roughly 75 feet above the traffic below.)
The second and final phase is installing the connectors — the structure’s shoulders that will permit freeway-fragmented wildlife to easily cross between the Santa Susana Mountains to the north and the Santa Monica Mountains to the south.
Expanding the areas where wildlife can safely roam will increase their chances of finding mates while improving the health and genetic diversity of everything from lizards to mountain lions like P-22, whose lonely life in Griffith Park helped inspire the crossing.
This second phase is the trickiest part of the project, especially the south-side connection over Agoura Road, according to Robert Rock, chief executive of Chicago-based Rock Design Associates and the landscape architect overseeing the $92.6-million project.
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing connector to the south will be supported by a tunnel over Agoura Road, which will roughly be located between the two white trailers in the photo and then threaded (as much as possible) around the small grove of mature oak trees into the Santa Monica Mountains beyond.
(Jeanette Marantos)
Work on the south side requires burying overhead wires near the site, moving water lines for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, stabilizing an underground creek (dubbed No-Name Creek) that runs under the tunnel site to prevent erosion and then driving two walls of pilings deep into the ground for 175 feet along Agoura Road to build the 54-foot-wide tunnel that will span the road.
Once the tunnel is constructed and the concrete roof is poured, workers will literally be moving a small mountain of soil from the north side of the freeway, where it was piled when this stretch of the 101 was constructed in the 1950s, to cover the tunnel and create the sloping connecting shoulder into the Santa Monica Mountains.
The final work will be planting more native shrubs, perennials and trees on the shoulders and adding two miles of galvanized steel fencing on either side of the crossing to funnel animals over the crossing and away from human-made roadways and homes.
Easy peasy, right? Except for one more detail — they have to do all this building and earth moving without disturbing a sprawling grove of native oak trees growing around the site.

The designers plan to thread their way through the small grove of mature oaks on both sides of Agoura Road to preserve as many of the mature trees as possible when building the south shoulder of the crossing over the road and into the Santa Monica Mountains.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s a tricky pocket,” said Rock. “We’re definitely threading a needle.”
Some of the smaller trees may have to be removed, he said, but the designers are doing everything they can to maintain the native trees growing around the site. Not surprising, because the whole project has focused on re-creating nature as much as possible on a foundation of concrete and steel, with native plants grown from seeds collected within a three-mile radius of the project and soil specially inoculated with local fungi and microbes to enhance their growth. The plants are being tended at the project nursery a few miles from the site.
C.A. Rasmussen Inc., the Valencia-based contractor who built the first phase of the project, has won the bid to do the second stage as well, said Rock. Weather delays — primarily from heavy rains in 2022 and 2023 — have pushed the crossing’s final completion date to the end of 2026. The state of California has provided $58.1 million of the $92.6-million project, as part of its “30 by 30” goal to conserve 30% of the state’s lands and coastal waters by 2030. The rest of the funds are coming from private donations.
Work on the final phase is expected to begin next week. Much of the prep work and tunnel construction will require at least a partial closure of Agoura Road, but the builders have to give 30-days notice before the closures begin.

Artist renderings of how the tunnel over Agoura Road and the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will look to the south, heading toward the Santa Monica Mountains, when the crossing is completed at the end of 2026. The top view is facing east on Agoura Road, the bottom view is looking west.
(Rock Design Associates and National Wildlife Federation)

(Rock Design Associates and National Wildlife Federation )
The specific closure hours are still being negotiated with the city of Agoura Hills, but Rock said he expects Agoura Road will be only partially closed to vehicle and bike traffic during daytime hours, when the contractor will be working. The closures are expected to begin in early August, and last for “several months,” he said.
“I can’t really say [how long] beyond several months’ worth of impacts,” he said, “but I hope we can be done by the end of the year.”
A few plants are already beginning to grow on the main structure, from a special cover crop of four native plants hand-sown in the spring — golden yarrow (Eriophyllum confertiflorum), California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), giant wildrye (Elymus condensatus) and Santa Barbara milk vetch (Astragalus trichopodus), chosen because they best flourished with the mycorrhizal fungi and other microbes added to the soil.
Last week, at least one invasive black mustard plant was also visible on the crossing — not surprising since the surrounding hills were lush with the fast-growing, easily spread mustard earlier this spring — but contractors are supposed to keep those invasive plants weeded out, Rock said, to give the natives a chance to get established.
Hundreds of native plants that were grown from seed in the project’s nearby nursery will be planted on the crossing this fall, probably in October, said Beth Pratt, California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, who is overseeing funding and fundraising for the project.

The top of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing resembles a reddish Marscape now, although a cover crop of native plants — California poppy, giant wild rye, Santa Barbara milk vetch and golden yarrow — hand sown from seed this spring are starting to emerge. Hundreds of larger native shrubs and perennials, grown from seed in the project’s nearby nursery, will be planted on the crossing in October.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Save LA Cougars is selling a blend of six native seeds provided by Pacific Coast Seed (formerly S&S Seed) for people who want bragging rights to growing six of the native plants that will feature prominently on the crossing — common deerweed (Acmispon glaber var. glaber), ashyleaf buckwheat (Eriogonum cinereum), showy penstemon (Penstemon spectabilis), black sage (Salvia mellifera), narrow leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis) and foothill needlegrass (Stipa lepida)
You can order a packet of the souvenir seeds online for $10. Proceeds will support the project’s nursery, which is featured in a new Save LA Cougars video explaining how all the crossing’s native plants, soils and compost have been chosen and nurtured.
In the meantime, the recent tariffs have added a new funding concern for the project. It’s not clear yet if the project will need to do more fundraising to cover all the increased costs, Pratt said.
“Robert [Rock] and CalTrans have been working around the clock to redesign and value-design to get the costs down, which is why we’re able to proceed [with Stage 2],” Pratt said. “The team work has been extraordinary.”
It’s possible they may need to raise more money to cover final expenses like the two miles of extra-tall fencing that Rock estimates will cost around $2 million, but right now, Pratt said, the design adjustments seem to have contained the extra costs. “They got them down again, so I think we’re home free.”
Meanwhile, while all these human issues are unfolding, somewhere on top of the unfinished crossing that Western fence lizard appears to be making a home, even though the naked terrain looks like a moonscape right now. Pratt was leading a small group of visitors when she spotted the little reptile, and it took her a moment to process its import.
“I see Western fence lizards all the time in my yard and they are everywhere — one of the most common animals you will see in California,” Pratt wrote in an email. “But then it hit me, ‘Wait. This lizard is on the bridge!!!!! And this is the first animal I have seen on the bridge!!!!’ I stopped the group … and told them — ‘You are seeing the first animal on the crossing itself.’ Everyone cheered. Even the lizard seemed to know it was a special occasion. He posed for the photos I took.”
Lifestyle
Brother to Bruh: How Gen Alpha slang has its origins in the 16th century

A young boy holds up a sign reading “bans off her body bruh” at a rally outside the State Capitol in support of abortion rights in Atlanta, Georgia on May 14, 2022.
Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
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Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
Has your pre-teen child suddenly dropped the use of “Mom” or “Dad” in favor of calling you… “Bruh?” (As is the case for at least some of our editors).
While we can’t offer you compensation for the shock and confusion, we can provide an explanation of what “bruh” means and where it comes from in our latest Word of the Week.
Jamie Cohen, assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College, and Amanda Brennan, known as the Internet Librarian, say we can thank social media for getting us to this point.
What was once another shortened way to call a friend “brother,” “bruh” is now being used by Gen Alpha to address parents, express sadness, frustration, happiness and seemingly everything under the sun.
“It’s punctuation. It is a sentence on its own that, depending on how you say it and who it’s said to, it can mean anything,” Brennan said.

It’s become ubiquitous thanks to TikTok, but the origins of this word, expression or what have you, go back as early as the 16th century.
Where did ‘bruh’ come from?
Over many hundreds of years, a number of words have emerged that abbreviate “brother” including “bro,” “bra” and now “bruh.” The earliest evidence of an abbreviated use of “brother” is with the word “bro,” used as early as the 16th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, former editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
“Bro” usually came before “a man’s name or to a character, especially the name of an animal,” Sheidlower said. In African American folklore, we see “bro” being used in this way during the 19th century, especially in the Caribbean and Southern U.S., he said.
The first known use of the word “bruh” appeared much later, in the 1890s, according to Merriam Webster.
Back then it was being spelled “brer” and comes from the “Br’er Rabbit,” a series of stories by Joel Chandler Harris, an American journalist and folklorist who wrote these stories from the African American oral tradition, Sheidlower said.

The Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox characters are seen in the Splash Mountain attraction at Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom on August 9, 2020, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
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Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
How has internet culture brought us to “bruh”
For a long time, “bruh” was put aside in favor of “bro” or “bra” (as surfers liked to call each other).
The use of “bruh” is a perfect example of how internet culture and especially TikTok, have transformed how people talk to each other, according to Brennan, who used to work at Know Your Meme, a website dedicated to documenting internet phenomena.
“I think ‘bro’ and ‘bruh’ are great examples of how words evolve over time and take their meaning so far away from what it used to be,” Brennan explained.

Guests attend TikTok Presents Something Beautiful Album Release Event With Miley Cyrus at Chateau Marmont on May 27, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images North America
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Emma McIntyre/Getty Images North America
“Bro” walked so “bruh” could run, essentially.
It really began with the age of the 2010s meme culture, a far simpler time in our internet’s history, when the use of “bro” became widespread. While “bro” can be used as a way to refer to a friend, the internet evolved its meaning to refer to a stereotypical frat boy and their style and culture as “bro culture,” Brennan said.
Brennan herself wrote the Know Your Meme page dedicated to explaining the use of “bro.”

Phrases and memes like “U Mad Bro?” became a sensation and so did “Come at me, bro” (from Jersey Shore fame). And then you have, “Don’t Tase me, bro!” a phrase plucked from a viral video of a University of Florida student begging security officers not to Tase him during a Q&A with then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry. (They Tased him anyway.)
A short-lived app called Vine, where users watched and posted 6 second long videos that played on a loop, brought us to “bruh,” according to Cohen, the media studies professor.
Twelve years ago high school basketball player Tony Farmer collapsed after hearing his sentence in criminal court for kidnapping, assaulting and robbing a former girlfriend. A creator on Vine used this clip and put the sound effect of someone saying “bruh” as Farmer collapsed. As far as we know, that is the origin of “bruh” on the Internet, Cohen said.
Why does “bruh” matter today?
“Bruh” is popular on TikTok as users have taken the word to launch into a story, express shock, or confusion, or even to address their parents or teachers, Brennan and Cohen said.
Cohen says young watchers of TikTok are taking “bruh” and running with it.

In this photo illustration, the TikTok app is seen on a phone on March 13, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
“You could probably have a complete conversation with one word just based on how you use it. It can be despair or it could be excitement or it could be just a reference,” he said.
Brennan added, “But the meaning is defined by everything happening in the moment around it, and it is a temporal word where I could say it five times a day, and each time could be like a different meaning of a sentence and it’s just one sound.”

Brennan had some advice for parents grappling with this new turn of phrase.
“Don’t be afraid of the slang. Just zoom out and think about how words are all made up by people, even the ones that aren’t slang, and read your context clues.”
Lifestyle
Diddy Freak-Offs Can Spice Up Your Sex Life If They're Done Legally, Sex Therapist Says

Diddy
Sex Therapist Says Freak-Offs Can Crank Up The Heat In Bed …
Just Get Your Partner’s Consent!!!
Published
The Diddy trial is putting his freak-offs on the world stage … and a famous sex therapist says there are elements from the now-infamous sex marathons that couples can use to spice up their relationships — and there’s a legal way to make it happen too.
Dr. Laura Berman, best known for her show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, tells TMZ … lots of folks are struggling in their sex lives, either from a lack of sex or boring sex, and that’s why the freak-off element of the case — for all its appalling elements — is also titillating to some.

TMZ.com
The sex doc says there are lots of ways for couples to spice up their sex life without putting their relationship at risk … like sex toys and baby oil, which Diddy allegedly stockpiled.
The author of the newly released book ‘Sex Magic’ explains what other elements of Diddy freak-offs may help couples add something kinky to their bedroom routine, or lack thereof … and tells us why consent is key here.

TMZ.com
We also talk bondage, safe words and open relationships … so what are you waiting for, watch the video!!!
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