Critic’s Notebook The HBO show—the most thrilling offering currently on TV—zeroes in on the domineering masculine impulse that drives the world of finance. September 29, 2024 Illustration by Katherine Lam The third season of the HBO financial drama “Industry” opens on a luxury yacht, off the coast…

Who’s afraid of psychoanalysis? Yorgos Lanthimos. Or, at least, that’s the prevailing impression from Poor Things. Lanthimos’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel is a certified hit, nominated for illustrious awards and pitched as a feminist black comedy, with Emma Stone winning the Best…

It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my…

Open Questions A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most. August 27, 2024 Illustration by Josie Norton I read “Middlemarch” for the first time during my sophomore year of college. I didn’t get it. Why would Dorothea, a young and intelligent woman,…

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Access through your institution This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access…

It’s hard to know what to make of the newest effort by László Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace. The novella concerns an aging librarian at the New York Public Library named herman melvill. He is overtaken by an obsessive interest in three artists who also lived and worked in Manhattan: the…

“What I really want is to work on…is strategy,” I’ve heard from colleagues on every team I’ve been on. And it’s no surprise — big strategy projects can sometimes seem like the most exciting and high-profile projects in a tech company. They call to mind visionaries who change the world by thinking…

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a…

One of the simplest tasks I perform every morning is turning on the lights. I flip the switch, the lights go on. In reality, turning on the lights is actually a complicated process, probably involving solar panels, power grids, neighborhood transformers, circuit breakers, and more. But all I know is…

Poster created by my wonderful former colleague Leonardo De La Rocha Early in my career, I remember asking the most senior engineer I worked with to join an urgent meeting that week. They agreed. But when I sent the invite, they responded with, “Actually, I have that morning blocked off to do work,…

How many times have you seen a senior industry leader who's done amazing things in their past roles come into a new company or team and...struggle? Whether it's by coming in hot and trying to change things too fast, or feeling like an impostor and not speaking up, it's hard to be a new leader. Put…

No figure in the whole of English literature is as reviled as the critic. He seems to have been invented to provoke scorn and skepticism. Among the first men to borrow from the Latin criticus (“one who judges”) to create the English word critike was John Bridges, Bishop of Oxford, who, in a 1587…

Henri Matisse, "...Dors, dormeuse aux longs cils..." 1944 Like many clinicians, I am conflicted and ambivalent about the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). There is a never-ending, exhausting debate around it. There are several strands of controversy around BPD, pertaining to:…

Each boy had an alcove and a curtain to pull in front of it, but the other boys did not regard what was within the boundaries of that cloth-and-plywood square as your personal space. These days, other people, like my fellow third formers, can wander in and out of my on-line personal space almost at…

Prelude: Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University who many have described as one of the most revolutionary biologists of our age. His work has been featured everywhere from Scientific American to the Lex Fridman podcast and The New Yorker. I spent the past month reading a bunch of his papers…

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Fall 1996. A young Chris Fralic is selling software for Oracle. He’s not sure what he wants to do next, but he’s always been curious about venture capital. And then some unusual magic happens — a friend offers to introduce him to Kevin…

Six years ago I celebrated my 68th birthday by gifting my children 68 bits of advice I wished I had gotten when I was their age. Every birthday after that I added more bits of advice for them until I had a whole book of bits. That book was published a year ago as Excellent Advice for Living, which…

Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis Norton, 388 pp., $35.00 The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited and with an introduction by Alex Andriesse New York Review…

In the Spring Books issue, on the occasion of Cathy Curtis’s new biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Merve Emre writes about the restless critic who cofounded the New York Review and contributed more than one hundred incisive essays before her death in 2007. Emre does Hardwick the honor of an…

It is of course painful to meet one’s limits, no matter the situation or circumstance. When I say limits I speak in the most general sense. Every personality is encircled by its prohibitive rind, by the extreme that makes it impossible to go further. The moment when one thinks, “no more,” or more…

I lost my first language at the age of four. Before that age, I spoke and understood, and then, like so much else, the words fell away during my one-way trip over the Atlantic Ocean. Here is a black void that was never bridged. Even after my rapid inculcation into English, I never gained a…

Adjust Share The black, rubbery mat bubbles unpredictably beneath my back as I hold one sixty-pound dumbbell in each hand, palms facing each other above my chest—knees bent, feet firm—and move my arms out, then lower them, slow and controlled. I feel my chest stretch. I fight gravity. I raise the…

Driver flees ahead of a worsening dust storm during the Dust Bowl; Texas Panhandle, 1936. The higher ground is getting pricey. That’s because how fast we go may be the world we get1, but where you live is the future you face. However successfully we embrace sustainability and decarbonization now,…

Solemos olvidar que el primer partido creado en nuestro país fue un partido de oposición. En 1887, Antonio Taboada fue arrestado por osar candidatarse en oposición a Bernardino Caballero. Unos días después de salir de la cárcel, él y varios más se dieron cuenta que necesitaban juntar fuerzas,…

I can see now where this story ended, although for a long time I was playing with other endings, reluctant to let go. It ended with that moment of cinema, crossing General Stroessner’s spongy lawn and looking back to see him, framed in the doorway, waving. I waved, went through the gate and into the…

On a warm day last spring, dozens of protesters gathered outside a shopping center on the west side of Hawaii’s Big Island. They weren’t there to boycott a store or a pipeline or to deride a politician. They came to revolt against a new ban on feeding cats in the parking lot. “Stop starving the…

Secondary Gain is an anti-advice column. It follows in the tradition of other psychoanalytic experiments that have opened up the consulting room using media: from Susan Isaacs’s advice columns in the interwar period and Winnicott’s radio broadcasts during World War II to experiments with radical…

The Fence is a quarterly magazine based in London, focused on life in the UK and Ireland. Read More Home Latest Facts Features Fiction Etc Index Title A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W X Y Z Author A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Category Features Spotlight Culture…

Developing employees November 8, 2023 Big Cheese Photo/Getty Images Summary. Leer en españolLer em português Project managers, in theory, are some of the best candidates to become CEOs of their organizations. In their daily work, they must bring together all the disparate aspects of theory, reality,…

Alain Delon as Riple Tom Ripley in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) 1960 Comrades, Welcome to the desert of the real. Free from all forms of censorship that pervade our media, Žižek goads and prods philosophy, politics, culture, and so on. For the time being, my writing on here will be…

The first test screening for The Talented Mr. Ripley was, as producer William Horberg remembers it, “a total disaster.” The early cut of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, plopped its eponymous con artist (Matt Damon) into a seaside Italian town—where…

404 Not Found. We can not find the page you are looking for.

Originally published in Arabic, this is our first piece in a rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called “Palestine Question.” Essays will engage the…

Profiles Does the director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Gladiator” see himself in the hero of his epic new film? November 6, 2023 Sony’s Tom Rothman calls the octogenarian director “the single best argument for a second term for Joe Biden.”Photograph by Christopher Anderson for The New Yorker On…

Profiles In more than a hundred works of fiction, Oates has investigated the question of personality—while doubting that she actually has one. November 20, 2023 Oates kept a journal for twenty-six years. Throughout its four thousand pages, she alludes to a secret. “It’s always there,” she…

Clever and dexterous, his writing delights in puzzles, puns and lepidoptera. Here’s where to start. (There’s so much more than “Lolita.”) By Oct. 15, 2023 People who dislike Vladimir Nabokov tend to find his dexterity stressful, like watching a circus performer juggle torches for hours. The solution…