Haruka Aoki’s “Nothing to See”
Animals displaying human behaviors are often the stuff of fables, intent on communicating moral lessons. But in this work, by the Japanese American poet-illustrator Haruka Aoki, a cat is,…
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Style
Taylor Swift’s Master Plan
In retrospect, that Tumblr post might be one of the most important things that Swift has ever written. It has all the qualities of a good Taylor Swift song, conjuring an image of an…
Why Do Doctors Write?
The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical construct—“my patient”—hadn’t yet entered my consciousness,…
Iran’s Daughters of the Sea
They have worked in defiance of Iran’s labor laws, which stipulate that “women shall not be employed to perform dangerous, arduous or harmful work.” For decades, the government failed to…
What We’re Reading This Summer: Mega-Reads
Unlike Peter Thiel and Giorgia Meloni, I did not grow up with “The Lord of the Rings” in my life, and, reading it now with my son, it’s hard to pinpoint what about it he finds so…
The Sixties Come Back to Life in “Everything Is Now.”
The film critic and cultural historian J. Hoberman’s new book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop,” is as jubilantly…
Miley Cyrus’s Voice
Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the release of her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” Miley Cyrus, who is thirty-two and one of the most successful pop stars of all time, revealed,…
“Ballerina” Leaps into John Wick’s Bloody World
It’s been instructive to see “Ballerina,” which opens this week, so soon after the new “Mission: Impossible” installment. In the latter, it’s hard to top Tom Cruise’s intrepid stunt work,…
Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern?
In 2022, Jacinda Ardern, the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, was approached by a stranger in an airport bathroom. Ardern was alone, washing her hands, when a middle-aged woman walked…
Alison Bechdel and the Search for the Beginner’s Mind
One weekend in 1986, on a jaunt in a rented cabin with her soon-to-be-ex-lover, Alison Bechdel, a virtually unknown cartoonist in her twenties living in the Twin Cities, had an anxiety…
What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I.
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled…
How the Broadway Musical “Maybe Happy Ending” Creates Visual Magic
The scenic designer Dane Laffrey on the inspiration he found while travelling in Tokyo and the ideas that led to the groundbreaking set design of the Broadway musical, which stars Darren…
What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime
Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman,…
David Hockney’s “Going Up Garrowby Hill”
There are many ways to celebrate spring, but few contemporary artists have devoted more attention to the topic than David Hockney. The cover of the June 9, 2025, issue features Hockney’s…
Jarvis Cocker Is Out of the Rain
This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in…
Rashid Johnson’s Own “Poem for Deep Thinkers”
It’s an epic display of small ideas. But what gives the exhibition its coherence is Johnson’s consistent—if tonally varied—engagement with literature. “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” is named…
Jack Whitten Went Hard in the Paint
He poured the paint in layers and combed through it with an Afro pick. Or he froze and shattered it, reassembling the shards into new wholes. Like an alchemist, he altered its consistency…
“Love Letters,” Received Forty Years Too Late
The vast spectrum of streaming platforms is like so many libraries: countless treasures line the shelves but little attention is paid to them. One of the virtues of the Criterion Channel,…
Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life
Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly…
Can the Southern Baptist Convention Survive Without Women Pastors?
In a few weeks, members of Southern Baptist churches from across the country will convene in Dallas for their annual convention. These gatherings, which attract thousands of people each…
Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Triumph Sends a Warning to Authoritarians Everywhere
When “It Was Just an Accident,” a new movie from the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, on Saturday, Panahi responded in a way that I’ve never…
“Your Friends and Neighbors” and the Perils of the Rich-People-Suck Genre
The first episode of the new Apple TV+ drama “Your Friends and Neighbors” takes pains to explain how one can rake in master-of-the-universe money yet never feel financially secure. Jon…
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Torture and Tres Leches in Iran’s Most Notorious Prison
The Evin House of Detention, in Tehran, is among the world’s most infamous prisons. It was built by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to hold around three hundred political…
Kadir Nelson’s “Major Taylor, a Champion Who Led the Way”
For the cover of the June 2, 2025, issue, the artist Kadir Nelson features Marshall W. (Major) Taylor leading a parade of bicyclists from eras past and present. “I wanted to pay tribute to…