Five glowing boxes slowly descend from the rafters to the sound of screams. Inside each is a present designed in the 1990s to please women around the world. The contents have aged more than 20 years since their shiny debut, but thousands of fans have gathered to see the Backstreet Boys at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas this spring — reliving their Y2K youth, or perhaps reimagining it.

“I was supposed to go to their show, and Hurricane Georges ruined it all,” a Florida native tells me in line at the merch counter. That was in 1998 when she…

Joe Hanson, CEO of EmpireLabs — maker of the Clone-a-Willy, a $49.95 kit that turns your dick into a colorful, vibrating silicone sex toy — hadn’t fully considered the question of what his customers should do with their penis replica post-break up until he was confronted with the situation firsthand.

While making small talk on an internet date in Portland last year, his new lady friend “totally freaked out” when he told her about his profession — not because she was weirded out to find herself at dinner with a successful sex toy entrepreneur, but because she thought of herself…

The last time Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were matched up in a rom-com relationship was Crazy Stupid Love, when Stone memorably asked him, “Please, will you take off your shirt?” The moment he did was Gosling’s ascendence into Body Goals Hall of Fame—his six-pack taut and hairless, floating inside a perfectly appointed modernist home.

This was 2011 and Gosling was in his douchiest role, playing a guy who lived his life according to fitness guides from men’s magazines. But the douchiness passed because the body was that good. …

As Americans head home this week to awkwardly catch up with their extended families over traditional autumnal dishes, it can be tempting to just get stoned out of your mind to disengage from the drama, the inevitable arguments about politics and the boredom.

But why not include your family in the fun—by turning traditional favorites like sweet potato pie into some kind of sweet potato high? Perhaps the blissful effects of edibles will smooth out your dinner guests’ rough edges, inspire random acts of love and kindness and move conversation in trippy new directions.

To find out the best…

“Do you feel anything yet?” asks the nurse practitioner at a “med spa” somewhere in Southern California after popping into the clinic’s “vitamin room” to check on my IV.

I’ve been sitting in the leather reclining chair for maybe 30 minutes now, with my left arm extended as straight as possible to facilitate the mineral-rich solution entering my veins. Some patients can “taste” the vitamins as the saline medium enters the blood, she tells me. Others describe a feeling of semi-euphoria as they sit there watching the med spa’s flat-screen TV.

I personally feel nothing so far, but maybe that’s…

As the election morphs from being this thing that people have spent way too much time talking about into this thing looming less than six weeks away, Hillary Clinton’s apparatus for turning out the vote is kicking into high gear, and her campaign is beginning to fret even more over a question that’s dogged them all this campaign season and longer: What’s up with the youth?

A recent Bloomberg Politics poll confirms that Clinton leads Trump by 10 percent among millennial voters (those aged 18 to 35). But when Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are…

When Kristen Barber’s father, a stunt pilot born in 1925, needed to look good, he’d turn to products marketed at his wife to get the job done, including hair dye and moisturizer. But by 2003, when Barber’s youngest brother was a tween, the landscape of products available to men had evolved so much that her brother could fill a medicine cabinet with his different colognes — and feel no shame about what that said.

How American men’s relationship with beauty products changed so much over the 20th century became a fascination for Barber, who ended up researching the men’s grooming…

Apparently the highly competitive game of parenting has turned into a literal dick-measuring contest. The New York Times’s health blog, “Well,” published an article about the newest fear to rattle helicopter (or should we say heli-cock-ter?) parents: that their sons’ penises aren’t big enough:

Questions about penis size have become more common over the past decade, as my colleagues and I have all seen more overweight children coming in for physical exams. And these worries reflect cultural preoccupations and anxieties, which can make the conversation highly fraught for all concerned.

“I see dissatisfaction with the phallus very regularly,” pediatric urologist…