Jess Bloom

Jessica Kent was detoxing off methamphetamine and oxycodone in an Arkansas jail when she found out she was pregnant. Three months later, the guards took her to a doctor’s office for a prenatal check-up where people took pictures of her in the waiting room, the chained-up inmate with a baby bump. Now, she’s a sober mom of two living in the suburbs of Chicago and tells the whole story in her YouTube video, “I Had a Baby in Prison,” which currently has over a million...

It’s easy to be skeptical when a rapper starts working with acrylics, but Bronson’s expressive color palette and distortions of the natural world can, at times, evoke hints of Neo-Expressionist painting. Perhaps the best-known example is a red-and-white canvas with a cobalt blue horse at its center, encircled by a two-headed snake, which became the album cover for his latest record, White Bronco (2018).

The Best Western in Galena, IL looks unremarkable from the outside — just another hotel chain off the highway. Inside, it’s a different story. There’s a stone-walled cave room, a shell-shaped bed in the aquarium room, and a classic honeymoon suite filled with mirrors. “What a nice surprise,” Margaret Bienert says to the camera, soaking in a foamy bath and drinking wine from a plastic cup with her husband, Corey.
As a travel video series, Margaret and Corey’s A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour is charmi...

Why do mundane real-world jobs make for such fun digital experiences?

There’s nothing flashy about Ziqian Liu’s photography. Her portfolio is a muted palette of soft gray, beige and brown. It’s a mix of mineral and metallic that’s earthy yet otherworldly, as if the photos were taken in a bunker deep underground. And in this quiet space, Liu tells the nonlinear narrative of her body—a finger pokes out of an elbow, a hand appears where a foot should be, arms and legs tangle around each other.
Liu’s self-portraits shy away from direct eye contact and her facial ex...

Sometimes, the best memories are from the times that challenge us the most
The sun is setting as our bus leaves Belgrade and speeds past the small towns of Serbia — Ruma, Šabac, and then Banja Koviljača — on its way to Sarajevo, Bosnia. Big dogs and small children run around the tidy front yards of short, squat houses. Every so often, the red clay of a tennis court flashes by and then it’s back to fields of green. I’m reading Logavina Street by Barbara Demick and I’m not sure how to feel abou...

I Think About This a Lot is a series dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.
When Kim Kardashian was 30 years old, she briefly married basketball player Kris Humphries. The marriage lasted 72 days and their relationship has since become a blip on her pop-culture legacy — but within that blip is a blip that I think about every time I brush my teeth. In those moments, with a vibrating electric brush between my lips,...

Perhaps even more than in other professions, artists need compassion, community, and self-care to navigate the complexities of chronic illness.

This is about so much more than ketchup and fries

The art world has always been a male-dominated one, so how can women break in?...

There are plenty of places in Toronto to catch a drag show. The public library is one of them. On the morning of December 30, the Jones branch hosted a New Year’s edition of Drag Queen Storytime. It’s RuPaul’s Drag Race meets Reading Rainbow, a family-friendly event where toddlers yell “Yaaaaasss” as queens read LGBT-themed picture books. The kids couldn’t take their eyes off of Erin B. and Lucy Flawless, two stunning Amazons in full face. We went to the packed event to speak with kids, paren...

Toronto's King of the Dot is one of the longest-running and most respected battle rap leagues in the world. KOTD live events have been hosted by Drake, Too $hort, Method Man, and Raekwon. YouTube videos of the battles have pulled in millions of views. It's easy to see why: This is rap in its rawest, most offensive, and most immature form—MCs lay down bars that touch on their opponents family, race, sexual orientation, appearance, and whatever else they can grab hold of.

According to a new study, female bats vomit blood into their hungry peers' mouths. We asked the researchers what this means about the power of female friendship....

Toronto’s Rita Leistner has decades of experience as a war zone photographer, but she battled a different sort of rough terrain for her new portrait series, The Tree Planters. At first glance, her images look like the posed dioramas you might find in the ROM, but the shots are so full of detail that you can almost smell the sweat and bug spray. The large-scale photos will be on display at Stephen Bulger Gallery until November 18, alongside drone video footage that shows exactly how Leistner w...

For people with dacryphilia, "cry me a river" is a pick-up line....