World
Should We Look on New Technologies with Awe and Dread?
The inevitable progress of technology, in other words, makes the technological sublime elusive. And it’s also true that technologies tend to shrink themselves, taking on unassuming guises. (“Technologies tend...
The Light of “The Brothers Karamazov”
What is the light in “The Brothers Karamazov”?It is the voices. “The Brothers Karamazov” is a novel of voices. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, foolish, wise: all are...
A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope
The two have sparred before. In 2009, they exchanged public letters in the Guardian, circling a question that nags at many eco-minded Westerners: What, in practice, can one do?...
Mark Bittman’s Experiment in Sliding-Scale Fine Dining
By dinnertime, the café had been convincingly transformed into a restaurant, with tea lights twinkling beside wildflower arrangements on exactingly set tables. The food came out slowly as the...
What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?
Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some measure of her talent, or maybe of her...
Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry’s Teen-Age Dream
Katy Perry is a friend of Bezos and Sánchez and has herself spent time on Koru. In April, she also climbed aboard another vessel associated with the couple, when...
The Lessons of “The Perfect Neighbor”
“The Perfect Neighbor” chronicles how Lorincz, in her attempts to turn law enforcement against members of her own community, managed only to unite the two groups in shared disgust....
A Superbloom of Daring Theatre Hits New York
In Preston Max Allen’s “Caroline,” directed deftly by David Cromer, a onetime wild child, Maddie (Chloë Grace Moretz), reëngages with her estranged mother, Rhea (Amy Landecker)—the penitent young woman...
Yo-Yo Ma on What Our Descendants Will Inherit
Earlier this month, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma turned seventy—an occasion that led him to reflect on not just his own past but also the planet’s future. In a...
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days...
