The Coach in the Operating Room (2011)

Outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes. What about regular professionals? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

A tycoon's deep state conspiracy dive

Patrick Byrne, the former head of Overstock, had always been outspoken. Did an affair with a Russian agent push him too far? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Shigeru Miyamoto Wants to Create a Kinder World

The legendary designer on rejecting violence in games, trying to be a good boss, and building Nintendo’s Disneyland. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

John Le Carré Missed Nothing

He was a gentleman and a spy, though he would have stoutly denied that the two could coexist. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age

Nancy Floyd began taking a self-portrait each morning in 1982 and sustained the practice on and off for nearly four decades. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Getting Vaccinated Will (and Won’t) Change My Behavior

The shot will make me less worried about getting the virus—but I’ll still fear passing it on to others. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

I Met My Wife (1994)

SHOUTS AND MURMURS about man who describes meeting his wife at a party. In his description, he drops many prefixes. It had been a rough day, so when I … | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

As the pandemic set in, the shows that stood out to me most were those that transported me—especially when they made me laugh. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism? (2014)

It’s impossible to disavow Heidegger’s useful and influential thinking, but it’s also impossible to set aside his sins. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Answer Man: An ancient poem was rediscovered–and the world swerved (2011)

An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Aquarium: A child’s isolating illness (2011)

“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that ‘words failed.’ But words were not failing Teri and me at all.” | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

What If You Could Do It All Over?

The uncanny allure of our unlived lives. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Why New York’s Mob Mythology Endures

We hang on to legends of the Mafia’s inner workings as parables for the wider world. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work

If Slack, which improves a fundamentally flawed approach to collaboration, is worth tens of billions of dollars, imagine the value in fixing the underlying problems. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

My Life in Cars

I lucked into the romance of driving at its fervent peak. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

What an FDA Committee Weighed in Voting for the Pfizer Covid Vaccine

In the present circumstances, one could imagine a far more fraught F.D.A. hearing than the one that took place on Thursday. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Dianne Feinstein's Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question Among Senate Democrats

Older lawmakers’ foibles and infirmities are coming under new scrutiny, violating an unspoken culture of complicity and coverup. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Cream

“ ‘There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily,’ the old man had said, with unshakable conviction, like Pythagoras explaining his theorem.” | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

T. S. Eliot’s Muse

For years, Emily Hale was the object of his longing and the source of his inspiration. Was the loss of their romance a boon for his poetry? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Skeletons at the Lake

Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Patrick Byrne – A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

Patrick Byrne, of Overstock, had always been outspoken. Did an affair with a Russian agent push him too far? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Wood Wide Web (2016)

Recent scientific revelations raise big questions about what trading, sharing, or even friendship might mean among plants. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

How Joe Biden Could Help Internet Companies Moderate Harmful Content

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was intended to prevent the Internet from becoming home to all kinds of unsavory, offensive, and possibly illegal content. What parts of the law are worth saving? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The dangerous “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Race to Make Vials for Coronavirus Vaccines

A Corning factory in upstate New York is running around the clock to help meet the urgent demand. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Using the homeless to guard empty houses

As the pandemic makes an already terrible housing crisis worse, a new version of house-sitting signals a broken real-estate market. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

What If You Could Outsource Your To-Do List?

Virtual assistants are one click—but often one continent—away. A new industry for bringing order to our work lives could shift the order of our workforce. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

His campaign tells us a lot about what kind of Commander-in-Chief he will be. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

A Quest to Discover America’s First Science-Fiction Writer

It’s been two hundred years since America’s first sci-fi novel was published. But who wrote it? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Our Brains Explain the Season’s Sadness

A pandemic, compounded by simultaneous political, civil, and natural crises, is overwhelming human evolution’s greatest innovation. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Egg Men (2005)

Burkhard Bilger’s 2005 piece on the short-order cooks at the Flamingo hotel, who crack well over a million eggs a year, in a city built by breakfast specials. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

William Faulkner’s Demons

In his own life, the novelist failed to truly acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation. But he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Preparing to Spin the Wheel of Fortune

You may win a lot of cash and tons of prizes, but please don’t do anything stupid, like quit your day job. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Mines the Paranoia of the 1980s and Today

If the prevailing bipartisan anxiety is the idea of America laid low from within, Cold War delivers an MK-ULTRA-calibre dose. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Art of Building the Impossible

The carpenter behind some of New York’s most elaborate—and expensive—homes. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Joylessness of Cooking

Feelings of emptiness are normal in times of stress and uncertainty. But isn’t cooking supposed to be a balm? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Why Newsmax Supports Trump's False Voter-Fraud Claims

Christopher Ruddy, the conservative network’s C.E.O., says that the President’s lies are “great for news.” | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

How the Biden Administration Can Free Americans from Student Debt

In the anthropologist David Graeber’s view, the balance sheet must periodically be wiped clean, to free us from debt as an economic burden and as an ideology that distorts our interactions. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism

Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Tennessee Solution to Disappearing Book Reviews

Chapter 16 is one of only a few nonprofit media outlets in the country dedicated to coverage of the arts. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

How Close Is Humanity to the Edge?

Toby Ord, a philosopher who studies our species’s “existential risk,” has been both frightened and encouraged by our response to the pandemic. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

When the Enslaved Went South

In the four decades before the Civil War, thousands of fugitive slaves escaped from the U.S. to Mexico. Runaways found both unfamiliar risks and high rewards south of the border. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”

The only thing that makes it possible to read and reread the best novels is not knowing what comes next, even though we have read them before. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Agent (2006)

Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11? | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

“Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV

In its recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre of television that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago

Joe Gould’s Teeth: The long-lost story of the longest book ever written (2015)

Joseph Mitchell thought Joe Gould was lying about his mammoth oral history. The truth was even stranger. | Continue reading


@newyorker.com | 3 years ago