Reporting
- American Chronicles
The Data Delusion
We’ve uploaded everything anyone has ever known onto a worldwide network of machines. What if it doesn’t have all the answers?
- Annals of Religion
How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?
Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?
- A Reporter at Large
The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign
Rumors destroyed Hazim Nada’s company. Then hackers handed him terabytes of files exposing a covert campaign against him—and the culprit wasn’t a rival but an entire country.
- Profiles
The Wild World of Music
What can elephants, birds, and flamenco players teach a neuroscientist-composer about music?
The Critics
- Books
Why the Animal Kingdom Is Full of Con Artists
Some crows “cry wolf” to snatch food from their neighbors; some caterpillars trick ants into treating them like queens. What can we learn from beasts that bluff?
- Books
How an East German Novelist Electrified Socialist Realism
Seizing upon the margin of artistic freedom she was allowed, Brigitte Reimann captured life in the G.D.R.—and her own fissured commitments.
- Books
A Shape-Shifting Short-Story Collection Defies Categorization
Kelly Link’s postmodern fairy tales make the case for enchantment.
- The Theatre
The Wounded Bluesmen of “Hang Time”
In Zora Howard’s play, at the Flea, three Black men hanging in midair discuss their world views, seemingly stuck in the gray gap between life and death.
- Books
Briefly Noted
“Ghosts of the Orphanage,” “The Absent Moon,” “An Autobiography of Skin,” and “The Dog of the North.”
- On Television
Victoriana Drenched in Red Bull, in FX’s “Great Expectations”
A new television adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel, streaming on Hulu, avows, too brashly at times, that it’s no staid PBS affair.
The Talk of the Town
Amy Davidson Sorkin on indicting Trump; a history of hush money; Paris divided by trash; archeology with Andy Samberg; “Fat Ham.”
- Comment
How Republicans Are Handling Trump’s Possible Indictment
The responses to Alvin Bragg’s Stormy Daniels case may not offer the best guide to navigating the former President’s legal troubles.
- You Don’t Say Dept.
When Donald Paid Stormy: A History of Hush Money
Buying silence is as old as Genesis. Among the hushers: Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Bette Davis, and a U.S. President with a special friend called Jerry the Penis.
- Paris Postcard
Walking Paris’s Garbage-Strewn Streets
With France’s public trash collectors joining a general strike, the city has been divided in two: the Trashes and the Trash-Nots.
- L.A. Postcard
Hunting Megafauna with Andy Samberg
At the La Brea Tar Pits, the creator of “Digman!,” a show about archeologists based on a Nicolas Cage impersonation, sorts through dire-wolf remains and frets about Archeologist Twitter.
- The Boards
“Fat Ham” ’s “Blackerer Version” of Shakespeare
The cast and the writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which riffs on “Hamlet,” enjoy a pre-Broadway-opening feast at Melba’s in Harlem.
Shouts & Murmurs
- Shouts & Murmurs
Upcoming Landmarks in Artificial Intelligence
Robot police dogs that don’t need oiling, autonomous dental floss, and other neato perks on the road to the Singularity.
Cartoons
Fiction
- Sketchbook
The Legend of the C Train
Few have seen her with their own eyes. Fewer still have ridden her.
- Fiction
“Alisa,” by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
“It was very simple: once she was overcome by an unbearable illness, she could poison herself.”
Puzzles & Games Dept.
Poems
- Poems
“Reincarnation”
“Sometimes when I look at our dog Jack I think / he might be my Radical American History professor come back to make amends.”
Goings On About Town
- Night Life
The Sparkling Standup of Morgan Bassichis
“A Crowded Field,” at Abrons Arts Center, is the last in the comedian-activist’s musico-comic trilogy about radical Jewish politics.
- Tables for Two
An Experiment in Queering Fine Dining, at HAGS
At the East Village restaurant, opened by a queer couple, the menu, offered as a three- or five-course tasting, leans cerebral.
