World
What Will Become of the C.I.A.?
In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with...
Justin Bieber’s Messy, Improbable Masterpiece
In the course of Justin Bieber’s nearly twenty-year career, his music has come to be somewhat immaterial to his celebrity. For many, he is an almost Kardashian-like figure, whose...
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Gentle Parenting My Smartphone Addiction
On a recent weekday, I sent an Instagram message to a friend of mine, an art adviser in New York named Stephen Truax, to gossip about an exhibition. Instead...
A New Agnès Varda Exhibition Is an Extension of Her Life’s Work
When Varda shot portraits on location, her practice was both observational and interventionist. She took subjects around town in her car in search of suitably photogenic sites and then...
How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity
About those faraway realms: Can we really credit two white Victorians, and their peculiarly German fetish for classification, with the invention of homosexuality? Anticipating this question, the exhibition opens...
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 could barely stand. Fajgenbaum, a former college quarterback,...
Ryan Davis’s Junk-Drawer Heart
On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a former Catholic school in Kingston, New York. Indoor...
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you think the...
Joost Swarte’s “Sunny-Side Up”
For the cover of the July 21, 2025, issue, the artist Joost Swarte portrays how New Yorkers have been feeling in the midst of a heat wave. “The part...
A Memoir of Working-Class Britain Wrings Playfulness from Pain
The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged forward...
