CATEGORIES

SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY

Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”

LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!

Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.

JOY RIDE

Grant Petersen wants to preserve the craft, and delight, of cycling.

Drug of Choice - The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work.

AI. is transforming the way medicines are made. Bacteria produce numerous molecules that could become medicines, but most of them aren’t easily identified or synthesized with the technology that exists today. A small percentage of them, however, can be constructed by following instructions in the bacteria’s DNA. Burian helped me search the sequence for genes that looked familiar enough to be understandable but unfamiliar enough to produce novel compounds. We settled on a string of DNA that coded for seven linked amino acids, the same number found in vancomycin. Then Burian introduced me to Robert Boer, a synthetic chemist who would help me conjure our drug candidate.

Screams from a Marriage

‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

Fly with Me

The children’s books of Katherine Rundell.

The Mystery of Pain

Garth Greenwell’s novel of extreme affliction and ordinary happiness.

The Show Must Go On

What if Ronald Reagan’ Presidency never really ended?

LAST COFFEEHOUSE ON TRAVIS

For a few months, I stayed with my aunt's friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there.

Tales from the New World

The novelist Richard Powers considers our changing earth.

Land of the Flea

What America 1s buying and selling.

The Post-Moral Age

If conscience is merely a biological artifact, must we give up on goodness?

How We Got the Story

This five-part series, which includes this three-part series on how we got the story, is the result of a two-year investigation, involving dozens of legal filings, scores of interview requests, several interviews, innumerable Zoom meetings, and five 311 calls.

People of the Magazine

Jewish Currents wants to criticize Israel while holding on to Jewishness.

AFFINITY COMEDY

The state of the Netflix standup special.

DUTY DANCING

How Seamus Heaney wrote his way through a war.

DESPERATELY SEEKING

The supreme contradictions of Simone Weil.

WILD THING

MJ Lenderman resists the smoothing, neutering effects of technology.

LUCK OF THE DRAW

Nate Silver argues that poker can help us game our uncertain world.

GREEN SLEEVES

“What I want to know,” the woman said to the therapist, “is why the voices always say mean, terrible things.

EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH

Alfred T. Alfred, whose invention of the plastic fastener that affixes tags to clothing upended the tag industry and made him one of America’s youngest multimillionaires—until he lost his plastic fastener fortune in a 1993 game of badminton, as depicted in the Lifetime original movie “Bad Minton”— died on Saturday. He was eighty-one.

BE HER GUEST

The plush ambience of Ina Garten's good fortune.

SPREADING THE WEALTH

Why a young heiress asked fifty strangers to redistribute her fortune.

THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT

An audience with the Pope.

On Television - Devil May Care - "Evil," on Paramount+.

"Evil," on Paramount+. The version of Catholicism favored by David Acosta, one of the two protagonists of the delightfully unhinged religious procedural “Evil,” likely doesn’t exist. David (Mike Colter), a Black man who starts the series as a priest-in-training, is often let down by the Church’s ossified white leadership. But his more progressive faith is accompanied by rather medieval forms of devotion. He battles against demons, participates in exorcisms, and chases the high of a formative vision of God, even if he can now only achieve moments of transcendence with the assistance of psychedelics. The temporal dislocation of his calling creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, but, in David’s view, dedicating himself to the Church, for all its imperfections, may be his best chance at insuring that the world doesn’t go to Hell in a handbasket.

Early Scenes - Remembering a childhood in the South Bronx.

When I was born, in 1940, my father, Salvatore Pacino, was all of eighteen, and my mother, Rose Gerardi Pacino, was just a few years older. Suffice it to say that they were young parents, even for the time. I probably hadn’t even turned two when they split up. My mother and I lived in a series of furnished rooms in Harlem and then moved into her parents’ apartment, in the South Bronx. We hardly got any financial support from my father. Eventually, we were allotted five dollars a month by a court, just enough to cover our expenses at my grandparents’ place.

The Kamala Show

The evolution of Harris’ public persona.

A Cult in the Forest - The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds

The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds. The colonial government tried to suppress it, because a faction of pro-independence freedom fighters belonged to the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa, which included messages about decolonization in its hymns. But after independence, in 1963, Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Christianity spread. They emphasized charismatic forms of worship—visions, spiritual healing, speaking in tongues—and a gospel that promised prosperity to the faithful. “If you want your church to be full, do what I call ‘spiritual gymnastics,’ ” Martin Olando, a scholar of African Christianity at the Bishop Hannington Institute, in Mombasa, told me. “Jump up and down, prophesize good tidings, tell people what they want to hear.” By the nineties, Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, enjoyed a beneficial relationship with Arthur Kitonga, an influential Pentecostal bishop. “President Moi has been appointed by God to lead this country,” Kitonga said at the time. William Ruto, Kenya’s current President, and its first evangelical one, brought gospel singers into his campaign team and party, and has donated cars, and thousands of dollars, to evangelical churches. His wife, Rachel, invited the U.S.-based televangelist Benny Hinn to preach with her at a crusade. (This year, Hinn apologized for giving fake prophecies. “There were times when I thought God had showed me something that He wasn’t showing me,” he told the Christian podcast “Strang Report.”)

FAITH HEALING

\"Between the Temples.\"

FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY

How Post Malone made himself at home in Nashville.