The New Yorker
What's So Funny?- A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh.
A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh. How the brain processes humor remains a mystery. It’s easy to make someone smile or cry by electronically stimulating a single region of the brain, but it’s astonishingly difficult to make someone laugh. The “laughter circuit” is complex and various. Puns are processed on the left side of the brain by gyri, bumpy areas on the surface of the cerebral cortex; more complex, non-wordplay jokes are routed through gyri on the right side of the brain and also trigger electronic activity in many other parts of the brain.
10+ min |
August 19, 2024
The New Yorker
The Critics - The Art World - Bad Dream - What was Surrealism really about?
What was Surrealism really about? Where are we with Surrealism, then? Quite possibly in the same plain little room where we began. The lighting is clear, the walls straight, the corners decorously right-angled. Something is off, but psychoanalysis won't help us.
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
PROMISED LAND
How tribal nations are reclaiming Oklahoma.
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
DIVORCE STORY
Sarah Manguso’ blow-by-blow account of a fracturing marriage.
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
THE INHERITOR
What does Robert F: Kennedy, Jr, actually want?
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
The life of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
AFTER LONG SILENCE
Carolina Uccellis inventive 1835 opera, Anna di Resburgo,” is returned to life.
6 min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
THE DEVIL TAKE IT
The Faustian bargain has quite a history—and future.
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
IN DEEP
“Lady in the Lake,” on Apple TV+.
5 min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
THE TAIL END
Bidding farewell to a cat
10+ min |
August 12, 2024
The New Yorker
Forbidden Desires - Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.
Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.
6 min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
My New Thing
My new thing is journaling. It was bullet journals, but now it’s journal bullets, which is where I make a quick note anytime I see a magazine. No, the other kind of magazine.
2 min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
OUT THERE
In midlife, Gillian Anderson is proving that she’s not so buttoned-up.
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
STATE OF PLAY
Politics and the real” at the Festival d‘Avignon.
5 min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
BORN AGAIN
The past and future of Christian fundamentalism.
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
PLAYING THE NUMBERS
My mother, the gambler.
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
UNCONVENTIONAL
No fear and loathing in Milwaukee, just confidence.
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
BLOOD RELATIVES
Did the U.K.’ most infamous family massacre end in a miscarriage of justice?
10+ mins |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
attila
Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.”
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
THE FIN AND THE FURY
Beware of sharkless waters.
10+ min |
August 05, 2024
The New Yorker
What Happened To The Yuppie?– In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities
Tom McGrath's "Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation" (Grand Central) is an entertaining recap of that period. McGrath doesn't offer a novel sociological interpretation of the yuppies. What he has to say about them would have been conventional even during their time.
10+ min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
Old Money - How treasure from an eighteen-century shipwreck ended up in the hands of a Florida couple
How treasure from an eighteenth-century shipwreck ended up in the hands of a Florida couple.
10+ min |
July 29, 2024
Writer’s Digest
Writing for a Warming World - Imagining the overwhelming, the ubiquitous, the world-shattering.
Climate change is one of those topics that can throw novelists—and everyone else—into a fearful and cowering silence. When the earth is losing its familiar shapes and consolations, changing drastically and in unpredictable ways beneath our feet, how can we summon our creative resources to engage in the imaginative world-building required to write a novel that takes on these threats in compelling ways? And how to avoid writing fiction that addresses irreversible climate change without letting our prose get too preachy, overly prescriptive, saturated with despair?
8 min |
July - August 2024
The New Yorker
A YOUNG ARTIST
An Italian widow is still discovering the joy of painting at ninety-three.
10+ min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
BIZARRE REALITY
Julio Torres's \"Fantasmas\" finds truth in fantasy.
5 min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
How Jet Democratized the Thirst Trap
When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, I knew of only one way that a mere mortal could be pictured in a bikini for paying subscribers.
2 min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
GOINGS ON
What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week.
1 min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
THE BRINK OF WAR
Will Hezbollah's border fight with Israel lead to a wider conflict?
10+ min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
Abject Naturalism + Sarah Braunstein
The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil. Perfidy!
10+ min |
July 29, 2024
The New Yorker
HEAVY WEATHER
Some first-generation disaster films were real-life disasters for their actors. D. W. Griffith's 1920 melodrama \"Way Down East,\" featuring the climactic rescue of a woman being carried off on an ice floe in raging currents, was filmed in a real river after a real blizzard.
6 min |