Style
A New Wave of Cinematic Riches Arrives at Cannes
“When will this fucking movie be over with?” It’s a question that surfaces often at the Cannes Film Festival, where hour blurs into hour, movie bleeds into movie, and,...
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?
In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made...
Pavement Inspires a Strange, Loving Bio-Pic
I once assumed that Pavement would be forgotten by later generations, just as the knowing, sarcastic wit of the nineteen-nineties came to seem passé in the two-thousands. The band’s...
R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nine when his uncle was murdered and fourteen when his father was. Even in his youth, he recalled, he doubted that Oswald had acted alone....
How Barry Diller Stayed on Top
Throughout, Diller occasionally muses on the excellence of a script—“Raiders of the Lost Ark” was, he says, “perfect from the first word”—but he is, appropriately, far more preoccupied with...
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life
Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but perhaps they’ve just made the same points...
The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward, infiltrated late-nineteenth-century culture as an...
Times Square’s Revolving Restaurant Comes Around Again
Seeing New York City from above—from the upper deck of the Empire State Building, or from the window of an airplane making an up-the-Hudson approach to LaGuardia Airport—is always...
Kenny Smith Isn’t Going Fishing Yet
Last July, the National Basketball Association announced a new eleven-year media-rights agreement with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN, set to take effect at the start of next season. Notably left...
The President Who Became a Prophet
On April 1st, the day before President Donald Trump’s tariffs cratered global markets, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “to trust the President’s instinct on the economy.” In the...
