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World
John Singer Sargent’s Scandalous “Madame X”
Summer is a season ripe for scandal; people tend to be overheated and understimulated, looking to mist their crisping minds with idle gossip. Minor controversies can boil over, given the…
Is “The Phoenician Scheme” Wes Anderson’s Most Emotional Film?
Wes Anderson’s new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is a funny-ha-ha comedy, but there’s nothing funny about its story, which involves a wealthy industrialist’s attempts to realize a…
Oval Office Ambush
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Peter Godfrey-Smith on Alien Intelligences in Our Midst
In the two-thousands, the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith began snorkelling off the coast of his native Sydney, where he became captivated by giant cuttlefish. The experience…
The Criminalization of Venezuelan Street Culture
On the morning of April 23, 2024, Claudio David Balcane González, a twenty-six-year-old musician from the state of Aragua, in Venezuela, arrived at the Texas border. In the previous three…
Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral
The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of…
Two Paths for A.I.
Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future of its own…
Returning to the Scene of My Brutal Rape
A woman is running. In the path, a man appears as if from nowhere. He is masked and he holds a knife. What are her choices? On one side is the canal and on the other a high, impassable…
William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Invention of American Conservatism
National Review embraced Goldwater. Bozell ghostwrote his campaign book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” a hit with college students. But Goldwater was crushed in the general election,…
The Self-Taught Cook Who Mastered the Flour Tortilla
As a kid growing up in Hermosillo, the biggest city in the arid northern Mexican state of Sonora, Ruben Leal took the region’s signature flour tortillas for granted. You could find them…
The Finale of “The Rehearsal” Is Outlandish and Sublime
Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman before him, makes performance-art comedy that does not only poke fun at the world but experimentally perturbs it, and he plies this trade in the buffer…
Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer
I believe that the single best dessert a person can have after a satisfying restaurant meal involves walking five to eight city blocks to a nearby ice-cream shop, to get a double scoop on…
Why Tom Cruise Will Never Die
By constantly putting his life at risk, Cruise has saved his career. The stunts have become so vital to the franchise that Cruise and McQuarrie have taken to planning them first, and then…
How American Photography Came Into Its Own
The earliest photography was voracious and encyclopedic. There was a whole world of things that had never been seen in this particular, startlingly realistic way. People were especially…
Summer Culture Preview
High-stakes competition makes for high drama in “F1 the Movie” (June 27), directed by Joseph Kosinski, starring Brad Pitt as a Formula One driver who is forced out of action by a grave…
What It’s Like to Root for the Knicks
I’m not always so good at taking notes on basketball games that I plan to write about, especially if my haunted team, the New York Knicks, is among the contestants. It feels like bad luck.…
The Emotional Seesaw of the Knicks’ Playoff Run
I’m not always so good at taking notes on basketball games that I plan to write about, especially if my haunted team, the New York Knicks, is among the contestants. It feels like bad luck.…
Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber Star in a Pair of Psychosexual Slugfests
“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,” setting out a catalogue of revolutionary theatrical…
R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nine when his uncle was murdered and fourteen when his father was. Even in his youth, he recalled, he doubted that Oswald had acted alone. But, where his father…
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life
Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but perhaps they’ve just made the same points over and…
Times Square’s Revolving Restaurant Comes Around Again
Seeing New York City from above—from the upper deck of the Empire State Building, or from the window of an airplane making an up-the-Hudson approach to LaGuardia Airport—is always a…
The President Who Became a Prophet
On April 1st, the day before President Donald Trump’s tariffs cratered global markets, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “to trust the President’s instinct on the economy.” In the…
The Everyday Dramas of Manhattan Rush Hour
Salacuse is the kind of person who always seems to have a project or five under way. I first met him in 2000, and we’ve been friends ever since. (We are now colleagues-in-law, too: his…