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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, knee-length mackintosh, and winsomely dissolute demeanor of a poet, or so he believed, as he pursued a lavishly wayward…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…