World

What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?
If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition....
Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison
It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security state prison. There are sixteen students...
Earth’s Poet of Scale
If there was one absence in Burtynsky’s account of our time, however, it was the single greatest result of all that mining, burning, and consuming: the transformation of the...
Carrie Brownstein on a Portrait of Cat Power by Richard Avedon
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.For The...
What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?
In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin, “Wild Thing,” is the first to appear in...
An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up
John Updike’s professional relationship with The New Yorker began in 1954, when he was twenty-two and the magazine published his poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” but his personal...
Conor McPherson’s Reliable Treasure
Conor McPherson’s small 1997 masterwork “The Weir” has been one of the most reliable treasures of the Irish Repertory Theatre. First directed by Ciarán O’Reilly in 2013, revived in...
Package Tracking Takes a Dark Turn in “Paper Towels”
When an online order goes missing, employees are often blamed. But how should they be punished? Now premium users get to decide. Source link
The Simplistic Moral Lessons of “Superman”
The world may be going to hell, but the writer and director James Gunn has graced it with a sunshine “Superman.” The most recent installments in the franchise—Zack Snyder’s...
Remembrance of Scents Past
But Marks argues that smell is one of the most potent ways to give museum visitors a visceral sense of the past, and to help them remember what they...
“Hot Spot,” by Nora Lange
He called. She answered. He was her only sibling. He’d paid to have someone deliver her citrus so that she could avoid scurvy. Source link
“Too Much” Remixes the Rom-Com
Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for a certain...