World
Roman Polanski’s Self-Centered “An Officer and a Spy”
The prime parallel between the movie “An Officer and a Spy” and the life of its director, Roman Polanski, is obvious but inexact. The film, whose original French title...
“An Open Heart,” by Jamil Jan Kochai
This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.They cut open my father’s chest...
Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss
When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations...
Coming of Age in Panic Mode
The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his life. “White Out: The Secret Life...
The Revenge of Millennial Cringe
In the summer of 2009, a shambolic Los Angeles band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros released a single titled “Home.” A romantic duet between the group’s founder...
What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman.Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to...
How the Bonds Among Virtual-Reality Furries Saved a Life, in “The Reality of Hope”
Watch “The Reality of Hope.” Anyone who doubts the validity of relationships that take place only through a digital medium has never experienced one. But these days most of...
Why Hasn’t Medical Science Cured Chronic Headaches?
Two decades ago, I was leaving my morning clinic at the hospital where I work when I suddenly felt an excruciating pain in my head. It was as if...
The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.”...
Ethel Cain’s Anti-Pop Stardom
Midway through the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the camera cuts, for an instant, to...
