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.

DRUG OF CHOICE

AI. is transforming the way medicines are made.

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.

THE COLLECTOR

Bonnie Slotnick, the downtown food-history savant.

LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST

The forgotten history of sex in America.

LIVING UNDER A ROCK

A geologist reflects on her life.

THE PARTICLES OF ORDER

The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon.

BUNKER MENTALITY

Shopping for a home at the end of the world.

LIFE OF THE PARTY

The Democrats seem rejuvenated by their new candidate. Why was it so hard to get one?

A GUIDE TO BRAT SUMMER

This summer, we’ve found ourselves in an unprecedented era of Brat.

THE LAST DAY

How declining enrollment threatens education nationwide.

My New Thing

My new thing is journaling. It was bullet journals, but now it’s journal bullets, which is where I make a quick note anytime I see a magazine. No, the other kind of magazine.

Sea Change- Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.

In 2019, a plaque was erected to commemorate the first glacier in Iceland to shrink so much that it could no longer be considered a glacier. Like the tsunami stones of the past, the plaque carried a message for the future, a warning to believe in changes that might at first seem implausible. It also carried a recognition of responsibility. “In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

My Life's Work- All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I'm nobody.

Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college.

OUT OF THE PAST

At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.”

FUTURE IMPERFECT

“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face.