CATEGORIES

Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box

Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”

Party Planning - Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji

I don’t know which moment in US history former president Donald Trump imagines when he says, “Make America great again.” He has never given a definitive answer in any speech or interview. But I know exactly which moment Vladimir Putin imagines in his own vision for Russian greatness. It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill divided the world in Crimea.

Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo

For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.

A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari - How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru

"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.

Books- Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve - She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.

Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I've known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung, Rachel Kushner writes in The Hard Crowd, her 2021 essay collection. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades. As a girl in San Francisco's Sunset District, Kushner ran with a group whom she has described as ratty delinquents-kids who fought, who set fires, who got high too young and too often, who in some cases wound up incarcerated or addicted or dead. At 16, she headed to UC Berkeley for college, but returned to the city after graduating working at bars and immersing herself in the motorcycle scene. Almost immersing herself, anyway. Even when she was a 14-year-old sampling strangers' drugs at rock concerts, some piece of Kushner was an observer as well as a participant, a student of unsung histories.

Men on Trips Eating Food - Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants

As a reverse foodie-a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don't-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie'm not exactly a target viewer for the eating-and-traveling shows. I'm happy sitting behind my stacked up cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, reading Frederick Seidel. But now and again I'm touched; an image or a moment from one of these shows will move me.

What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors - In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.

Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so

Mapping Mississippi's Violent Past - I wanted to understand the forces that shaped my state's dark history. I ended up in Spain, holding an object I'd never known existed.

I'd come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow.

The Football Bro - Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.

If, on a cool weekend morning in autumn, you happen to be watching “College GameDay,” on ESPN, don’t worry about figuring out which of the broadcasters behind the improbably long desk is Pat McAfee. He’s the one with the roast-pork tan, his hair cut high and tight, likely tieless among his more businesslike colleagues. The rest of the onair crew—Lee Corso, Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and, newly, the former University of Alabama coach Nick Saban—tend to look and dress and talk like participants in an old-school Republican-primary debate. McAfee, though, favors windowpane checks on his jackets and a slip of chest poking out from behind his two or three open buttons. If the others are politicians, he’s the cool-coded megachurch pastor who sometimes acts as their spiritual adviser.

HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN

On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.

WITH THE MOSTEST

The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.

EYES WIDE SHUT

How Monet shared a private world.

SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY

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

JOY RIDE

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

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.

TRY IT ON

How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.

MIRROR IMAGES

‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”

Sniff Test - A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.

What does conspicuous consumption smell like? On a December afternoon in 2013, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was scheduled to meet with the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat at the company’s chandelier-crammed headquarters, near the Arc de Triomphe. The C.E.O. at the time, Daniela Riccardi, had commissioned Kurkdjian to create a limited-edition fragrance to mark the company’s two-hundred-andfiftieth anniversary. Baccarat planned to produce two hundred and f ifty diamond-cut crystal flacons of the new perfume, priced at three thousand euros each, and wanted the scent to reflect the quality and opulence of its vessel.

THE END OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE

One of America's greatest achievements could disappear overnight.

THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIKE LEE

IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.

You Think You're So Heterodox

Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.

Boat Fish Don't Count

The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass

THE LOYALIST KASH PATEL WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP WANTS.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

The Anti-Rock Star

Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism

HYPOCRISY, SPINELESSNESS, AND THE TRIUMPH OF DONALD TRUMP

He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.

JAMES EARL JONES' DARTH VADER VOICE LIVES ON THROUGH AI.VOICE ACTORS SEE PROMISE AND PERIL IN THAT

Over the course of an acting career that spanned more than six decades, James Earl Jones' voice became an indelible piece of his work as a performer.

US POSTAL SERVICE SQUEEZE ON SHIPPING CONSOLIDATORS COULD RAISE CONSUMER COSTS

The U.S. Postal Service said this week that it is ending discounts that shipping consolidators such as UPS and DHL use to get packages to the nation’s doorsteps, in a move meant to help the Postal Service slow losses but that could see the higher costs passed on to consumers.

GOOGLE AND APPLE LOSE THEIR COURT FIGHTS AGAINST THE EU AND OWE BILLIONS IN FINES AND TAXES

Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc's top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies.

THE AI INDUSTRY USES A LIGHT LOBBYING TOUCH TO EDUCATE CONGRESS FROM A CORPORATE PERSPECTIVE

The artificial intelligence industry has gone on a lobbying binge in the past few years, deploying scores of hired influencers to help shape potential government action.