Culture
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…
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a critic at large
News
The Argentinean Comic Strip That Galvanized a Generation
A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as…
Culture
Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
“Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while…
News
Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with a President from the Gilded Age
Late in his life, McKinley reconsidered protectionism. He was reëlected in 1900, and by his second Administration he felt that the United…
Culture
How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire
In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but…
News
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…
Culture
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out…
Culture
Was the Civil War Inevitable?
Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s…
News
It’s Always the Other Side That’s Been Brainwashed
It wasn’t so long ago that respectable psychologists didn’t really talk about “brainwashing.” The term had the slightly kitschy flavor of…
Culture
We’re Still Not Done with Jesus
The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever…
Culture
The Profile Hemingway Could Never Live Down
Throughout the profile, Hemingway, drinking hard, employs a kind of skin-tightening lingo that he called “Indian Talk.” It wouldn’t have…
Business
What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End
It’s a mite soon to start grieving, but scientists now project that life on Earth will probably end in about a billion years. A Monday in…
Culture
What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?
There are awards for the year’s best films but not for its best TikTok videos. That’s too bad, since 2024 yielded several tiny…
News
Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews
Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was…
News
What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?
In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular…
Culture
Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?
Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really…