World
Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single
One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although...
Robert Macfarlane on Books That Hold Water
The writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane has spent much of his life climbing up mountains and fishing on rivers, and his passion for each extends to his writing. Over...
How Donald Trump’s Crypto Dealings Push the Bounds of Corruption
Imagine that someone in a position of great political power created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually...
In “Jetty,” a Grand Infrastructure Project Becomes Both Visually and Politically Compelling
The algorithm has been feeding me industrial-strength A.S.M.R.: short videos of computer-controlled lathes, in extreme closeup, doing elaborate milling of wood or metal rods. Sam Fleischner’s modest yet ambitious...
Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?
This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This...
Our Favorite “Only in New York” Spots
“Only in New York” may be a cliché, but only because it’s so true. For Goings On, in our New York-themed centenary issue, we asked staff writers to share...
Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her students, “You don’t need a plot,...
How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy
In 2002, the thirty-five-year-old, Luxembourg-born painter Michel Majerus was on a short flight from Berlin, where he lived, to his native country, when the plane crashed, killing him and...
On “Hacks” and “The Studio,” Hollywood Confronts Its Flop Era
For years now, Hollywood has been on a losing streak. In the film and television business, good news has been harder to come by than original stories, with the...
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he...
