World
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had…
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Style
Sterling K. Brown’s Upstanding Archetype
There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when…
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The Trophy Abs and Soul Ties of “Love Island USA”
One good way to enjoy the latest season of “Love Island USA”—the seventh, in which new episodes aired on Peacock almost every day for six…
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Can A.I. Find Cures for Untreatable Diseases—Using Drugs We Already Have?
When David Fajgenbaum was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, at the University of Pennsylvania, he started to feel so tired that he…
World
The Met’s Luminous New Rockefeller Wing Still Casts Some Shadows
It may be the most impressive of the recently modernized colonial collections, far surpassing Berlin’s much criticized Humboldt Forum. One…
World
Is Technology Really Ruining Teens’ Lives?
In early 2021, the journalist Matt Richtel spoke to a father who was a few weeks into a nightmare. Tatnai Burnett was a doctor, his wife…
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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.…
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My New York City Tour of Tours
I’m a sucker for guided tours. I love a CliffsNotes condensation of a place. All of Rome in ninety minutes gave me a Visigothic sense of…
World
The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain
In 1857, Sam stumbled into the job that would shape his identity. Aboard a southbound steamboat—part of some half-baked scheme involving…
World
Jeremy Jordan Mines “Floyd Collins” for Its Sonic Gems
“The future of writing is the universe within,” the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel told an interviewer, in 2001. It had been five…
Style
An 1887 Opera by a Black Composer Finally Surfaces
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, and the cultural upheavals that ensued, classical-music organizations began including…
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The Many Guises of Robert Frost
Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin…
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An Arachnophobe Pays Homage to the Spider
Back in my footloose twenties, I lived for a year in Costa Rica, where I worked at a school in the central highlands and worked even…
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Giorgio Morandi Tried to Fit the World on a Table
As genres go, Italian still-life painting isn’t a ghost town, exactly, but it evokes more than its share of dust and tumbleweeds. It’s…
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The Frustrated Promise of the Rape Kit
In 1975, a rape victims’ advocate named Linda Reinshagen shared a story with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. A man on the South Side…
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What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End
It’s a mite soon to start grieving, but scientists now project that life on Earth will probably end in about a billion years. A Monday in…
Style
What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?
There are awards for the year’s best films but not for its best TikTok videos. That’s too bad, since 2024 yielded several tiny…
World
Washington’s Hostess with the Mostes’
Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were…
Style
Yukio Mishima’s Death Cult
I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long…
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He Was a Genius for the Ages. Can We Give Him a Break?
Gottfried Leibniz was not the first philosopher to think that we live in the best of all possible worlds. He may have been the unluckiest,…
World
Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?
In the autumn of 2010, Lynne Freeman, a family-law attorney and an unpublished author, put the final touches on her first novel, “Blue…
Style
Does Morality Do Us Any Good?
Sauer, who cautions that his chronological arrangements “shouldn’t be taken too literally,” terms the results of his multidisciplinary…
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Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
Like countless other people around the globe, I stream music, and like more than six hundred million of them I mainly use Spotify.…
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“Black Doves” Offers a Sentimental Spin on the Spy Genre
In the new mystery thriller “Black Doves,” the purview of secret agents can include school plays, bedtime stories, and holiday…