CATEGORIES

THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT

In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.

The Playwright in the Age of AI

In his new play, McNeal, Ayad Akhtar confronts, and subverts, the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.

Is Forgiveness Possible?

Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda

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.

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.

Boat Fish Don't Count

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

The Anti-Rock Star

Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism

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.

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 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.

HYPOCRISY, SPINELESSNESS, AND THE TRIUMPH OF DONALD TRUMP

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

THE END OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE

One of America's greatest achievements could disappear overnight.

'Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again' - A close reading of Trump-rally prayers

A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. Th e nation was in crisis, he told the Lord— racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”

Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap - The Impossible Pad to America - I went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to get to the United States.

I went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to get to the United States. Before making the journey, I spoke with a handful of journalists who had done so before. They had dealt with typhoid, rashes, emergency evacuations, and mysterious illnesses that lingered for months. One was tied up in the forest and robbed at gunpoint. They said that we could take measures to make the journey safer but that ultimately, survival required luck.

An Intoxicating 500-Yearold Mystery - The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars-and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists.

The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars-and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.

Pity the Bad Man

A bold new novel invites the reader to consider the plight of the bullies and the boors.

The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson

Her surprising marriage to Robert Louis Stevenson changed literary history.

Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel?

The hero of Danzy Senna’ new satire is trying, and failing, to write one.

How Greed Got Good Again

In HBO's Industry, Gen Z reveals itself to be just as moneyobsessed as the corporate raiders of Wall Street.

My Mother the Revolutionary

She cared about saving the world more than she cared about me.

HOW M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

The filmmaker weathered some of the wildest hype and harshest backlash that Hollywood has to offer. Then he found a different path.

AMERICAN FURY

For years, experts have warned of a wave of political violence. We should prepare for things to get worse before they get better.

Kafka's Not Supposed to Make Sense - Kafka died a century ago this year at the age of 40, and since then a mighty industry has arisen to deliver all of the messages that Kafka said would never be delivered.

It would be foolish to claim that Kafka learned his metaphysical wordplay from Jewish texts alone. He read widely: Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He admired the understated prose of Anton Chekhov and Heinrich von Kleist. He read literary magazines that published cutting-edge work, too. Still, his regular reading of the Bible—nightly, during some periods of his life—contributed a laconic quality to his classical prose that doesn’t make him anachronistic; it makes him original.

A Novel Without Characters

Rachel Cusk's lonely experiment: Parade. Her new book, a novel of elusive vignettes, it can be seen as an allegory about both fiction and the gendered shapes of selfhood.

THE GLACIER RESCUE PROJECT

Can the mighty Thwaites be stopped from tumbling into the sea?

The Industry That Ate America

The long and lurid history of lobbying

Tornado Watch

How Lee Isaac Chung reimagined Twister, one of the biggest climate-disaster thrillers of all time