Category Culture

Why Are We Tormented by the Future?

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Not long ago, my six-year-old son was in the bath, building cities out of colorful foam blocks. (“City blocks!” he said. “Get it?”) One metropolis, on the tub’s outside edge, was…

Roz Chast’s “Game Show”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “ ‘Hollywood Squares’ was one of the cheesier game shows of my childhood,” says the cartoonist Roz Chast, who drew her ideal selection of panelists for the cover of the January 13,…

Do Insects Feel Pain?

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story One of the stranger effects of Brexit was that, after the United Kingdom left the European Union, in 2020, it no longer recognized animals as “sentient beings.” When the U.K. was…

Memories of a New Orleans Boyhood

There was more than met the eye in that den of iniquity. Peter Tonguette Sitting on my desk is a photograph I took sometime in the mid-1990s.  I was perhaps 14 when, on what looks to have been a pleasant…

Writing as Transformation

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy.…

What Does Two ‘Champions’ Even Mean?

The chess world is outraged after Magnus Carlsen and Ian “Nepo” Nepomniachtchi split the blitz title. For once, everyone in the chess world appeared to agree with the controversial American chess grandmaster Hans Niemann. “The Chess world is officially a…

Zen and the Art of Homicidal Malevolence

Coolness and violence are inextricably linked in American culture, from the Old West to Luigi Mangione. Surely enough has been written already about Luigi Mangione, the ghost gun–toting Manhattan assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back. But…

The Empty Ambition of “The Brutalist”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Most filmmakers, like most people, have interesting things to say about what they’ve experienced and observed. But the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn’t know firsthand:…