Annals of Science
Unnatural Selection
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean while watching TV. When she was in elementary school, she would sit in front of “The Undersea…
Reporting
Life and Letters
Immediate Family
By Hilton Als
May 5, 2015: that was when Maggie Nelson’s ninth book, “The Argonauts,” came out. Published two months after the author turned forty-two, the slim, intense…
A Reporter at Large
The Assad Files
By Ben Taub
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty…
Letter from Italy
Beautiful Monsters
By Ariel Levy
In the Italian village of Capalbio, in the late nineteen-seventies, two peculiar things happened: the mail started arriving late, and people began whispering about the…
Sketchbook
Hillary/Bernie New York Primary Diary
By Barry Blitt
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
What “XOXO” Really Means
By Emma Rathbone
A guide to interpreting e-mail sign-offs: “XOXO”: Contrary to popular belief, this does not mean “hugs and kisses.” If anything, it’s intended to convey light…
Fiction
Fiction
Anhedonia, Here I Come
By Colin Barrett
Audio: Colin Barrett reads. Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, knee-length mackintosh, and winsomely dissolute demeanor of a poet, or so he believed, as he…
The Critics
A Critic at Large
Thrones of Blood
By Clive James
Binge-watching is a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It’s a way of being. We begin to esteem this way of…
Books
Lost Illusions
By Caleb Crain
On the morning of February 27, 1937, which began cold and gray, a few hundred Americans waited to storm a hill southeast of Madrid, near…
Books
Briefly Noted
Paradise Now, by Chris Jennings (Random House). In this history of America’s nineteenth-century utopian communities, Jennings examines how they upended conventions of property, family, and…
Books
Mind the Gap
By Dan Chiasson
The poet, translator, and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop, who turned eighty last year, has condensed her nearly twenty books of verse into a volume of selected…
Pop Music
Lifechanger
By Hua Hsu
In December, 2005, the Detroit producer and rapper James Yancey played a series of shows in Europe. Yancey, who went by the names Jay Dee…
The Current Cinema
The Bereaved
By Anthony Lane
There is a fine moment in “Demolition,” when Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) begins to weep. He stands in front of a mirror, black-suited, and his…
The Talk of the Town
Comment
The Sovereignty of Women
By Jill Lepore
In less than a year, the United States may well inaugurate its first female President. This outcome isn’t inevitable, but it’s a few blocks uptown…
Up Life’s Ladder
Young Turks
By Lauren Collins
Last week, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, implicating thousands of people in a global…
I Love You, Man
Hallmark 2.0
By Emma Allen
The other day, Andrew Horn sat on a red exercise ball in his startup’s Williamsburg office, a tricked-out former garage, and explained why he was…
Follow the Leader
Charisma
By Tad Friend
As he shed his tweed jacket, Hugh Dancy looked around Sushi Azabu, a basement nook in Tribeca, and said, “It feels like a railway car—if…
The Financial Page
System Overload
By James Surowiecki
“An example for the Nation” is how President Lyndon Johnson imagined Washington’s Metro, in a letter that he wrote fifty years ago to an official…
Goings On About Town
Above and Beyond
This Week
“In the cherry blossom’s shade there’s no such thing as a stranger,” the great Japanese poet Issa wrote. If so, there’s no better place to…
Night Life
Root Progression
By Matthew Trammell
For many fans, Esperanza Spalding’s story starts with her 2011 Grammy award for best new artist; it’s a foundation that she has both built on…
MOVIES
The World’s a Stage
By Richard Brody
The copious programming of the Tribeca Film Festival (April 13-24) stretches quality a little thin, but the best films in this year’s edition are worthwhile…
CLASSICAL MUSIC
A Man in Full
By Russell Platt
In the nineteen-nineties, those days of peace and prosperity and Pax Americana, Aaron Copland (1900-90) was the beau ideal whom young American composers strove to…
Bar Tab
Tomi Jazz
By Wei Tchou
If you’re lucky enough to snag a seat at one of the two long, narrow tables at this intimate, hard-to-locate jazz club (better to let…
Tables for Two
Okonomi / Yuji Ramen
By Becky Cooper
At Okonomi, a twelve-seat haiku of a restaurant in Williamsburg, you’re doing more than eating the chef Yuji Haraguchi’s food; you’re eating his philosophy, that…
Poems
Cartoons
Credit