A half-century ago, much of the world appeared to be in a state of crisis, with protests around the world, the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy. But there was some progress to be found as well.
Gathering by the campfire in our ideological tribes, we bask in the warm glow of unchallenged beliefs.
The rise of self-focussed photos has deeper and more complicated roots than simple millennial narcissism.
Recruiting companies offering one easy fix to gender disparities are getting taken way too seriously.
Let me be clear: “bad sex” isn’t rape. By “bad sex,” I mean the sex we have that we don’t want to have but consent to anyway.
At some point, we have to ask: “How do we educate boys in particular not to become these men?”
A response to Jack Dunphy.
The difficult-to-wear skirt helped to break down class barriers.
In his Journal 1935–44, Mihail Sebastian left a profound and moving record of some of the most terrible years in the history of Europe. The Journal is not only an invaluable historical document, fully as significant as the diaries of Victor Klemperer and Anne Frank, but also a beautifully shaped and subtly executed work of literary art. Never has the savagery of which human beings are capable been recorded with such insight, style, gracefulness, and, amazingly, humor. Now, in For Two Thousand Years, we have a fictional precursor of the Journal that in its way is equally fascinating, and equally shocking.
Modern-day voyeurism, when your exes never really fade away.
Besides the usual way
It makes sense to me that Johnny Appleseed, a man, would travel God's earth spreading his profligate seed. And then women are doomed to their lives trying to make that seed into something useful.
If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.
Our equine friends use 17 separate movements to communicate.
Fearing natural disasters and nuclear war, Americans are investing in freeze-dried food. But how does it taste?
In the week that feminism was declared word of the year by a dictionary, writers including Margaret Atwood, Mary Beard, Naomi Klein, Kamila Shamsie, Jeanette Winterson and others champion the books that first empowered them
It’s really about work.
We asked a preeminent historian to investigate our coverage of people of color in the U.S. and abroad. Here’s what he found.
On Allison Benedikt, Lorin Stein, and the perils of extracting universal principles from fairytale endings
Jia Tolentino writes about the violent misogyny behind the so-called incel movement.
A photographer captures the paths that birds make across the sky.
Jia Tolentino writes about two recent essays, by Jian Ghomesi and John Hockenberry, in Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, nearly a year after the start of the #MeToo movement.
People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect, Elif Batuman writes.
Is the rise of algorithmic decision making a good thing? There seems to be a growing cadre of authors, academics, and journalists that would answer in the negative. At the heart of this work is the concern that algorithms are often opaque, biased, and unaccountable tools being wielded in the interests of institutional power. These critiques and investigations are often insightful and illuminating, and they have done a good job of disabusing us of the notion that algorithms are purely objective. But there is a pattern among these critics, which is that they rarely ask how well the systems they analyze would operate without algorithms. And that is the most relevant question for practitioners and policy makers: How do the bias and performance of algorithms compare with those of human beings? It’s no secret that algorithms are biased. But the humans they are replacing are significantly more biased. After all, where do institutional biases come from if not the humans who have traditionally been in charge?
When Philip Seymour Hoffman succumbed to a drug overdose in 2014, his death was one of thousands sweeping the country. His partner, Mimi O’Donnell, reflects on the difficulties—and devastation—of addiction.
The price of a cafe con leche serves as a unique inflation gauge.
Mauro Morandi found serenity in solitude decades on Italy’s Budelli island. He now has to leave.
Buried in the collections of national archives and private enthusiasts lie stacks of candid shots of the country’s recent past.
When classics scholar Emily Wilson tackled her own English translation of the Ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey, she faced a major question in the very first line: Would she translate the Greek polytropos, which describes the protagonist Odysseus, as “much turning” in his difficult journey home to Ithaca from the war in Troy, or
Racial covenants have been legally unenforceable for decades, but they still exist in property records.
Stevie Martin on the guilt she feels at getting up late, despite getting everything done.
"The last thing we need is for this presumption of guilt of people of color, of Black people, to be confirmed erroneously through an algorithm."
Helen Rosner recommends “No Reservations: Narnia,” a work of fan fiction that imagines the celebrated food writer Anthony Bourdain’s wanderings through the magical realm of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
When it comes to writing the “other,” what questions are we not asking?
Books centered on women’s desire taught me to expect more from sex, and they could do the same for our whole culture
For a century and a half Ulysses S. Grant has been a baffling and inspiring presence in the American literary and historical imaginations. Born in 1822 and raised by a pious Methodist mother, as a young man he was quiet, given to depressions, and lacking much ambition. Only his love of horses seemed to animate him and give him a reason to excel in his education at West Point, which his scheming father desired for him more than he did. In his thirties, he was a complete failure, at times a drunkard, destined to die forgotten. He found his vocation and success on America’s killing fields; his meteoric trajectory in the Civil War makes him a remarkable case of a nobody who became almost everything.
If you leave the Marshall Islands, you likely won't come back.
People with intellectual disabilities are the victims of sexual assault at a rate seven times higher than those without disabilities. But this epidemic receives little attention.
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
*With Comments and Corrections by Hannah W Duane (her teenage daughter)
