A good political thriller is more precious than jewels, the Good Book says. Or it should, anyway, given that bad ones, like the poor, will always be with us. Who today would sit willingly through 2006’s The Sentinel, in which a there-for-the-paycheck Michael Douglas conducts a steamless affair with first lady Kim Basinger? Or Charlie […]
Lent is supposed to be a time of reflection and contemplation, but only if you do it right. And I can already say with confidence, barely a few days into this Lenten Season, that I am doing it wrong. In the first place, I ate a sandwich tonight at around 8 p.m., which was one […]
It was a scorching day in June 1965, and Israel’s pioneering Weizmann Institute of Science in the southern hamlet of Rehovoth was unveiling only the second computer the fledgling Jewish state had ever seen. But in selecting a speaker for the ceremony, the institute’s chairman didn’t invite a mathematician, a scientist, or an engineer. Instead, […]
An unfortunate byproduct of technological advancement is that there are new ways of being terrible to one another. Deepfake AI-generated pornography is the latest from the high-tech frontier in human cruelty. It produces images and videos that superimpose a real person’s face on bodies engaging in sexual acts. The resulting content is startling and gets […]
President Trump pulled out of the World Health Organization, cut funding for the UN’s Climate Convention, and more withdrawals are likely in the pipeline.
Early into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, narrator Chiamaka, or “Chia,” muses on the two women who matter most to her. There is her best friend, “organized, buttoned-up, ambitious” Zikora, a successful lawyer who has been less fortunate in marriage. There is her cousin Omelogor, a former banker, who is bracingly forthright and ruthlessly single-minded. […]
Everything you need to know about Leonardo da Vinci is contained in the work he did in the 1480s and 1490s for Ludovico Sforza — Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan. To call Ludovico a mercurial man is to employ far too weak a word. Ludovico was vacillating, spasmodic, and two-faced, a bipolar figure […]
In the era of peak Oscars, the movies commemorated were, at worst, honorably decent and, at best, the sort of sumptuously mounted, inoffensively impressive super-spectacles that the industry had good reason to be proud of: Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, Amadeus, The Last Emperor, The English Patient, and, inevitably but justifiably, Titanic. By the same token, […]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the […]
There’s a civilization north of the American border. Even among those who know of it, this “Canada” tends to be enigmatic. It is a place bigger by land mass than any country in the world apart from Russia and with a population smaller than Yemen’s, a place where the primary language is English but also […]
Will Trumpworld become Trump’s world? The domestic trifecta is attained, and the battle for the bureaucracy is joined. Donaldus Maximus turns to the far provinces of the empire: to Canada, Britain, and Gaul. He eyes the wild places beyond the walls and the water: Greenland and, again, Canada. He looks to the restive borderlands between […]
