World
How Far Can Political Ads Go to Swing the Vote?
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago—sun high, wind cool—I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the...
In “Juror #2,” Clint Eastwood Judges the System Harshly
It’s commonplace to acknowledge Clint Eastwood as one of the most distinctive and original political filmmakers. What’s surprising about his new film, “Juror #2,” is that the politics it...
The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture
In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant strain of online business models. The Wirecutter, which sold to the Times in 2016, made money by driving its visitors to...
How Binyavanga Wainaina Wrote About Africa
Not long ago, I saw an article that would have both delighted and exasperated the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. “Entrepreneurs are planning autonomous ‘charter cities’ as an answer...
Lorenzo Mattotti’s “Strides”
On Sunday, November 3, 2024, more than fifty thousand people from all over the world will participate in the New York City Marathon—an event that many New Yorkers deem...
The Mystery of Three Hundred Bodies in the Woods
How should the living treat the dead? More specifically, what should we do with their bodies, and why? The answers to these questions, like the mysteries of death itself,...
Does the Enlightenment’s Great Female Intellect Need Rescuing?
Historians championing previously marginalized intellectual and literary figures are often caught on the horns of an odd dilemma. On the one hand, the subject—the woman scientist, the Black composer,...
Jesse Eisenberg Has a Few Questions
Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes into my recent lunch with Eisenberg, in Chelsea, I had...
Soccer Mommy’s Visceral Chronicle of Loss
The earliest iteration of Soccer Mommy emerged out of a bedroom in the summer of 2015, with a handful of lo-fi, home-recorded songs posted to Bandcamp. The songs were...
Baseball Is for the Losers
Angell, Gammons, and I now rode the elevator. In the Boston clubhouse, a crowd of reporters surrounded Buckner’s locker, waiting. Cruel jokes were already being worked up. (Question: What...
