Arab Shah, in his favourite restaurant in Kabul.Photograph: Jim Huylebroek L ast November, Abdullah Sharifi visited a spirit medium. By his own admission, Sharifi was the last person you would expect to indulge in mysticism. Twenty-two years old, tall, handsome, with slicked-back hair, Sharifi…

Never marry again in slavery. — Margaret Garner, 1858 Wherever the law is, crime can be found. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973 I. “lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.” By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American…

A wooden home made from 60 locally sourced trees, featured in " Hide and Seek ," one of a slew of recent photo books devoted to chic cabins. Adolf Bereuter, Bernardo Bader Architects, from "Hide and Seek," Gestalten Publishers, 2014 According to legend, the humble dwellings are ideal launchpads for…

The following conversation between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 14. An audio recording of it can be heard at itunes.com/nybooks . —The Editors Pete Souza/White House President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa State Library, Des…

Photographs by Inez + Vinoodh The leader of the free world sits down with the free agent of the year—HBO’s Bill Simmons—to discuss the Obama era and beyond. The exclusive White House Q&A There's the president of the United States, and then there’s the person who happens to be the President of the…

Illustration by María Inés Gul. Regret, in my head, sounds like Joanna Newsom’s voice: I have often turned to her music in endings, in trying to remember beginnings, to parse everything in between, to know what I could have done differently, what I ought to have said. Divers, her first album in five…

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. —The Editors Reuters A still…

In California, <a target="_blank" href="https://books.google.com/books?id=l7VFfNXHEkYC&lpg=PA446&ots=GBflgVc_t3&dq=%22real%20estate %20capitalism%22%20city%20of%20quartz&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=%22real%20

The following is adapted from the introduction to 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories . A story is a noise in the night. You may be lying there quietly resting in the international house of literature and hear something in the walls, the click and burst of heat through pipes, a difficult…

Magnum Photos Tucson, Arizona, 2011; photograph by Paolo Pellegrin America is a Christian country. This is true in a number of senses. Most people, if asked, will identify themselves as Christian, which may mean only that they aren’t something else. Non-Christians will say America is Christian,…

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for…

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune. Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen. Credit Photograph by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to…

There’s a photo of Kanye West that stands out in my mind: Dressed in a red long sleeve polo shirt with blue accents on the ribbed cuffs, he’s leaning into the camera and grabbing onto the straps of hi

So let's talk about ad blocking. You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we're really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of…

Wang Dan (L) and Xu Yi at their funeral services shop, The Other Shore, in Beijing.Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix W ang Dan is a genial 34-year-old man with a soft, bulldog-like face and a quiet enthusiasm for the next thing coming. His heroes were forged in garages, dorm rooms and cheap flats.…

The first time Mark Zuckerberg put on the awkward headset he knew. This is ready, he thought. This is the future. On the outside, the Oculus Rift didn’t look like much: a matte-black box, roughly the size of a brick, that hung from his face like giant ski goggles, a tangle of cords running from the…

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash…

Fashion Marc Jacobs in New York’s West Village, where he lives and where he has built a mini-empire.Credit...Jason Schmidt HI, I’M MARC,” says a smiling, shortish, muscular man in a very white shirt and black trousers with even whiter socks. He has a housekeeper (“This is Reisa”) and a personal chef…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell One morning last week, as Washiqur Rahman, a shy, boyish-looking twenty-six-year-old Bangladeshi, left his house in Dhaka and started walking to the travel agency where he worked, three men set upon him with machetes and hacked him to death. The blows rendered his…

For over a decade, the rap superstar has made music that pushes boundaries, courts controversy and divides critics. Now, the man who has compared himself to Jesus and Steve Jobs just wants to make clothes for the masses. Vintage T-shirt. Acne Studios jeans, acnestudios.com . Kanye West x Adidas…

We knew what was expected of us. Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive. Image by Lorna Simpson , Ebony 2, mixed media, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York I. Are We Rich? Mother raises those plucked,…

Since last winter, after laying to rest the blowhard host of The Colbert Report and inheriting Letterman’s seat on The Late Show , the most inventive comic of his generation has been consumed with one very large question: Who will he be now? Stephen Colbert —the real one—gives a sneak peek. And in…

I hate browsing the web on my phone. I do it all the time, of course — we all do. Just looking at the stats for The Verge , our mobile traffic is up 70 percent from last year, while desktop traffic is up only 11 percent. That trend isn't going back; phones are just too convenient, beckoning us to…

The manila folder is full of faded faxes. The top sheet contains a brief description of my first medically confirmed manic episode, more than 20 years ago, when I was admitted as a teenager to U.C.L.A.’s Neuropsychiatric Institute: “Increased psychomotor rate, decreased need for sleep (about two to…

Skyrim Sunsets: Artist JON RAFMAN on Exploring VR with the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 In a tech landscape dominated by the emergence of wearables and other forms of networked practicality, the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 is a push towards escapism. Its improved verisimilitude sets a new…

T his April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of…

LeBron. Peyton. Tiger. Serena. Nigel. Nigel? More Culture When the 2014 National Scrabble Championship begins Saturday in Buffalo, New York, the odds-on favorite will be a 47-year-old New Zealander who resides in Malaysia named Nigel Richards. He is currently ranked first in North America. The…

Vince Staples, a rapper who recently released his major label debut album, “Summertime ’06.” David Azia for The New York Times The song by J. Cole you’re currently most likely to hear coming out of a car window is called “Wet Dreamz.” It’s about him losing his virginity, certainly the…

Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl? In February, at the Code/Media * conference in Dana Point, California, some of the most powerful people in media found themselves discussing an unsettling story published two weeks prior. The piece predicted that the future of the internet…

It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. Appelbaum is drinking a latte and eating a cherry danish with a fork. Ai is…

The women begin to arrive just before 8 a.m., every day and without fail, until there are thickets of young Asian and Hispanic women on nearly every street corner along the main roads of Flushing, Queens. As if on cue, cavalcades of battered Ford Econoline vans grumble to the curbs, and the women…

Millions of Americans get tests, drugs, and operations that won’t make them better, may cause harm, and cost billions. Credit Illustration by Anna Parini It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich and clicking through…

O n the evening of April 25 at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, in Baltimore’s revitalized downtown district, more than 100 police officers in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, shields up. Six officers on horseback fidgeted behind them, staring down at a crowd of about 40, an odd mixture…

“T he old New York-Los Angeles rivalry is changing, at least on the East Coast side of the equation. No longer do in-the-know New Yorkers reflexively parrot sneers like the old Woody Allen line, that the only cultural advantage of Los Angeles is the right turn on red.... Bearded young New Yorkers…

Chris Burden: "My God, are they going to leave me here to die?" May 25, 1975 | At 8:20 p.m., the body artist Chris Burden entered a large gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, did not look at his audience of 400 or more, set a clock for midnight, and lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet…

Penelope Umbrico’s “541,795 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 1/26/2006,” based on user-uploaded digital images. Photomontage by Penelope Umbrico/Mark Moore Gallery When he visited the Plumbe National Daguerrian Gallery in Manhattan in 1846, Walt Whitman was astonished. “What a spectacle!” he…

A discussion with designer JEROEN KRIELAARS of Calango . Give us a little background on yourself, and your design studio Calango. I studied concepts and brands at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute . It gave me certain creative skills, but I quickly discovered that a career in fashion was not for me. I…

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in…