World
My Life with Left-Handed Women
Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without an exchange of gifts among my two grandmothers, mother, and aunt, featuring the trait they shared: all four were left-handed. Waiting for them under...
Why Was a Climate Activist Put in Prison for Five Years?
The London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital. If you live in...
The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life
Some misunderstandings can be remedied by a simple explanation. Others end friendships or marriages. The most frightening miscommunications are those between nuclear-armed superpowers. In October, 1962, near the height...
The Cancer Scams That Foreshadowed MAHA
In 1986, Gilda Radner, one of “Saturday Night Live” ’s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer, at the age of forty. She...
How the Oscar Race Got as Messy as “Conclave”
Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A committee of august personages convenes, with much pomp and circumstance, to choose the best of their lot. Time-honored rituals are observed....
“The Fishing Place” Puts History Into the Present Tense
The best filmmakers, looking to the past, see the future. The Holocaust and the Nazi menace to Europe have been filmmakers’ mainstays for decades, and sometimes the effort (whether...
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Taste for Adventure
In the nineteen-nineties, Fuchsia Dunlop—now a celebrated food writer and expert in Chinese cooking—enrolled at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, becoming the first foreigner to attend one of...
FKA Twigs Leaves It All on the Dance Floor
Twigs’s own kitchen, she informed me, has a shelf of teas as long as the S.U.V. we were riding in: jasmine and rose “for beauty,” lemon balm, lavender, and...
Mourning David Lynch in a City on Fire
One night in January, 2002, during the initial theatrical run of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” a friend and I, students at the University of Southern California, drove up toward...
