Released earlier this month, Sandy Wexler is Adam Sandler’s third film made exclusively for Netflix as part of his lucrative deal with the streaming company. It is two hours and 11 minutes long—the only longer Netflix film is Cary Fukunaga’s weighty child-soldier drama Beasts of … | Continue reading
So far, the Trump administration’s North Korea policy consists of declaring that America’s patience has run out, refusing to negotiate, hinting at preventive war, and hoping that China bails it out. In January, Trump—who is perpetually learning things that most other people know … | Continue reading
“One Art” is the only poem I’ve ever lost. My high-school English teacher gave me a wallet-sized copy that I misplaced, along with the wallet, the next year. The wallet I replaced, twice; the poem I did not. Still, a year walking around with it in my pocket was enough to learn th … | Continue reading
We wear masks for many reasons: for fun, for protection, or to make a statement. In turbulent public settings, obscuring one's face can protect an individual from retaliation while evoking fear and uncertainty in others. With the recent rise of virtual reality technologies, masks … | Continue reading
Given all the fuss modern humans are told to put into our teeth—brush, floss, drink fluoridated water, go to the dentist to get tartar scraped off twice a year—I’ve wondered how our ancestors made due. What did their teeth look like?Peter S. Ungar’s new book, Evolution’s Bite: A … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, a man was violently dragged off a United Airlines flight after being told it was overbooked. And late last week, American Airlines suspended a flight attendant after a fight nearly broke out between a passenger and the crew, over a stroller. What did the two incide … | Continue reading
Wikipedia has always seemed destined to converge with the news. An encyclopedia that is updated in real time is its own kind of news aggregator, after all.And so it comes as no surprise that Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia co-founder, is now launching a Wikipedia-like news organizatio … | Continue reading
When algae die, they drift to the ocean floor, their bodies becoming one with the seabed’s muck. This algal rain falls constantly, and as layers of organic matter build up over the years, they bury the bacteria that grow on the seabed. Subsumed in the mire, many bacteria die. But … | Continue reading
Breitbart News’ application for permanent congressional press passes was denied on Tuesday, after a months-long attempt by the right-wing news outlet to obtain credentials.The Standing Committee of Correspondents of the Senate Press Gallery voted to table Breitbart’s application … | Continue reading
The president blinked.Donald Trump wants his border wall funded, but he apparently wants to keep the government open on his 100th day in office a little bit more. Facing the prospect of a government shutdown in four days, the president reportedly backed off his demand that a must … | Continue reading
When babies are born at 24 weeks’ gestation, “it is very clear they are not ready to be here,” says Emily Partridge, a research fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.Doctors dress the hand-sized beings in miniature diapers and cradle them in plastic incubators, where … | Continue reading
With France’s first round of voting complete, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is among the final two contenders for the presidency, along with centrist Emmanuel Macron. Given how often Le Pen invoked the specter of Islamic fundamentalism throughout her campaign, one might expec … | Continue reading
Kassie Benjamin-Ficken, a teacher in Minneapolis, discovered her love of math in elementary school. One of her earliest memories is begging her mother to come to school so her teachers could share how she excelled in math class. While earning average scores in reading, she was co … | Continue reading
In February 2010, a series of billboards began popping up around the nation. A grinning, waving George W. Bush appeared beside the phrase, “Miss Me Yet?” The answer was a resounding, Eh, sorta. Bush had bounced back somewhat from his abysmal final approval rating, but while Repub … | Continue reading
Whether one likes or dislikes Chelsea Clinton is beside the point.Imagine paging through an official handbook at The New York Times or NPR or Columbia University’s journalism school and encountering an entry with these guidelines:Prospective political candidates: A subject may so … | Continue reading
Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed biomedical papers to over 26 million. However, the average scientist reads only about 250 papers … | Continue reading
—Arkansas executed two inmates Monday night in the first double execution in the U.S. since 2000.—North Korea staged artillery drills to mark its army’s 85th anniversary amid rising tensions with the U.S.—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Easter … | Continue reading
A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that wo … | Continue reading
On November 23, the morning after his home was drawn into a different school zone, Mark Gonsalves slipped out of his office in Midtown Manhattan and rode the subway to the Upper West Side. He met his wife outside a tan-brick building on West 61st Street. It was P.S. 191. Together … | Continue reading
Call it luck, call it fate, call it the world’s most ridiculous viral marketing campaign, but the first television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is debuting on Wednesday to audiences who are hyper-ready for it. The 1985 speculative fiction work by Margaret Atwood has featured … | Continue reading
On a mild Friday evening in late October 2010, Ricardo Salazar-Limon was in his white Toyota pickup truck, driving west along Houston, Texas’s Southwest Freeway. After a long day painting and hanging sheetrock at NASA’s Johnson Space Center he stopped off at the modest gray ranch … | Continue reading
If President Trump wants to shut down the federal government over funding for his southern border wall, Democrats seem happy to oblige him.Four days before a deadline for Congress to pass a spending bill, the big question is just how much Trump wants to have the fight his adminis … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingThe French Election: Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and her independent centrist counterpart Emmanuel Macron advanced to the second round of the French presidential election yesterday. As neither Macron nor Le Pen is from a major party, the vote looks like … | Continue reading
Updated on April 24, 2017 at 6:18 p.m. ETIt may have taken nearly 100 days, but President Trump is poised to have his full Cabinet in place by the end of the week.The Senate on Monday evening approved former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to be agriculture secretary, culminating a … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesDuring his first public remarks since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama avoided weighing in on the new administration and encouraged students to become politically involved. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Direc … | Continue reading
When the doctor runs out of words and stillI won’t leave, he latches my shoulder andsteers me out doors.So begins Lucia Perillo’s “The Body Mutinies,” from our February 1996 issue. Perillo passed away last October after decades of living with and writing about multiple sclerosis. … | Continue reading
In 2015, a woman named Barbara Paschke was attacked and killed by a black bear inside her home in northwest Montana. Paschke, who was 85 and suffered from Alzheimer’s, had been feeding bears regularly on her property, a practice that is illegal and, as her death showed, potential … | Continue reading
The Earth and its moon almost form a binary planet system. The moon is enormous—relative to the size of its planet—compared with the rest of the solar system. Since the 1960s, spacecraft and astronauts have been able to “step back” far enough to capture combined portraits of the … | Continue reading
Robert Frost once described his initial joy in making a poem as “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” As a method of getting at the truth, poetry has no claims to scientific rigor—and that’s not why I read it. Rather, I think of poetry as the fact of feeli … | Continue reading
Every president faces a steep learning curve when he enters the presidency. There is, as John F. Kennedy, wrote, no school for commanders in chief. Yet even by that standard, recent interviews show a Donald Trump who is genuinely surprised by the size of his duties, the interests … | Continue reading
PARIS—Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist and ex-banker with a friendly lisp, who has improbably succeeded in casting a program of modest and highly technical economic reforms as a rousing project of French and European renewal, is France's presumptive next president. He will … | Continue reading
In the first moments of the HBO film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman nam … | Continue reading
In the first round of a French presidential election, there will, naturally, always be more losers than winners. But until Sunday, the Socialist Party had lost in the initial round only once before: in 2002, when incumbent President Lionel Jospin unexpectedly finished a close thi … | Continue reading
When she’s not working in her lab at Spain’s IBBTEC institute, Federica Bertocchini keeps bees. One day, when she looked at her hives, she found them infested with caterpillars called waxworms. These insects are the bane of beekeepers because they voraciously devour the wax that … | Continue reading
You could be forgiven for not making it through the entire transcript of Donald Trump’s recent interview with the Associated Press. The conversation is dizzying and at times incoherent.In a series of astonishing statements, Trump underscores the extent to which his worldview—and … | Continue reading
In its fourth season, Silicon Valley is facing the same problem many an established tech brand comes up against after a few years on the market: how to stay relevant? After charting the travails of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his Pied Piper company through various … | Continue reading
In the summer of 2011, earthquake swarms started hitting the Canary Islands off the African coast. The ocean belched up sulfur, staining the water yellow and green. Fish died. Seawater bubbled over like a jacuzzi. Smoking lava balloons leapt from the roiling surface.These violent … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump, as is frequently noted, is quite the tweeter. Some of his tweets are merely cause for another round of mocking his poor grammar; others kick off outright national scandals. Whatever it is, the internet is sure to react.But there is one corner of the intern … | Continue reading
President Trump knows that the United States is suffering through one of the worst drug epidemics on record. Its breadth was captured well by Christopher Caldwell, who looked back for comparisons. “A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-add … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, a publicist sent me an early copy of a book that claimed it would change everything I thought I knew about food.That happens a lot. This one caught my eye because it warned of the “hidden dangers lurking in my salad bowl,” and I was eating a salad.The book, The Pla … | Continue reading
—European leaders are warning against a victory for Marine Le Pen, the French far-right candidate who finished second in yesterday’s presidential election. She faces Emmanuel Macron, an independent centrist, on May 7.—Government funding runs out Friday unless Republicans, who con … | Continue reading
Samira Abdulkadir came to the United States 10 years ago, a young bride with a baby boy. She was from Somalia but came to the U.S. by route of Kenya, where she was married. The family settled just outside of Boston, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and Abdulkadir had more children. Her … | Continue reading
Sean Spicer was in trouble. In a press conference addressing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, the White House press secretary had fallen into one of his signature slow-moving train-wrecks of an analogy: “You had someone as despica … | Continue reading
Obamacare remains the law of the land. So does NAFTA. Tax reform exists only as pixels in a tweet. Infrastructure ain’t happening. Five months after the Republicans won united control of Congress and the presidency, it seems uncertain whether one-party Washington can avoid a gove … | Continue reading
The election of Donald Trump, and the early days of his presidency, have driven many Americans to rummage through history in search of context and understanding. Trump himself has been compared to historical figures ranging from Ronald Reagan to Henry Ford, and from Andrew Jackso … | Continue reading
Each week following episodes of the third and final season of The Leftovers, Sophie Gilbert and Spencer Kornhaber will discuss HBO’s drama about the aftermath of two percent of the world’s population suddenly vanishing.Sophie Gilbert: Spencer, am I right in thinking that last wee … | Continue reading
Following Thursday’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, which killed one police officer and wounded two others, Donald Trump made a prediction. “The people of France will not take much more of this,” he wrote on Twitter. “Will have a big effect on presidential elect … | Continue reading
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have little in common on the face of it. Macron, who exit polls project as the winner of Sunday’s first round presidential election in France, is a political neophyte. His centrist, globalist, pro-EU policies, are antithetical to the populist mov … | Continue reading