Ridgeline subscribers — I’m Craig Mod and I’ve been buuuuuuurnt out this last month following my epic Things Become Other Things mega book tour. Finally, I’m gingerly emerging from my recovery cave. (But reserve the right to retreat again.) Here’s a fresh dispatch — in praise of small businesses and…

Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on…

Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan London: Seven Dials, 262 pp., $19.99 (paper) Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything a documentary film directed by Sam Blair Ask almost any snooker fan to name the greatest…

LAS VEGAS — There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there's simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month…

I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve hitchhiked penniless for months, and I’ve flown by private jet. I’ve…

The Weekend Essay How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today. December 9, 2023 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, photographed in 2013.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several…

Inhalt Auf einer Seite lesen Inhalt Seite 1"Comparison is the way we know the world" Seite 2"We fail to think of historical events as developing over time" Lesen Sie diesen Text auf Deutsch. I’m going to talk about comparisons. Why do we compare? We compare to learn. This is how we understand the…

We, the undersigned Jewish writers, academics, journalists, artists, and cultural workers living in Germany, are writing to condemn a disturbing crackdown on civic life in the wake of this month’s horrifying violence in Israel and Palestine. There is no defense for the deliberate targeting of…

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it. by RS Benedict When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military…

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“Competition,” wrote Peter Thiel in his 2014 manual Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future, “is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap…

Onward and Upward with the Arts Adrianne Lenker’s Radical Honesty In her folk-rock songwriting and in interactions with her Big Thief bandmates, the musician’s raw openness creates strange and thrilling effects. October 12, 2020 Virtuosity doesn’t resonate for Lenker as much as vulnerability does.…

Alienated Rafia Zakaria , July 17, 2020 Tourist Detraction The tourism industry is closed; let’s keep it that way Lauchlin Wilkinson Columns C o l u m n s “There is no room for tourists in a world of ‘displaced persons,’” the author Evelyn Waugh declared sulkily. The year was 1946, and the world was…

It feels different this time. Black Americans protesting the violation of their rights are a defining tradition of this country. In the last century, there have been hundreds of uprisings in black communities in response to white violence. Some have produced substantive change. After the…

Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically…

A year ago, I came across an article by Stephen Elliott, a writer I’d admired. There were plenty of disturbing things about the piece—a self-pitying attack on the MeToo movement by a man who’d recently been accused of abusing women—but what startled me was that he had chosen to publish it in an…

Artistic rendering of a Tuesday night on social media. Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Google Art Project/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Wikipedia A number of public thinkers are pining for a culture capable of hosting spirited debate in a neutral “marketplace” of ideas. In this…

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. For the sake of this exercise, please imagine it’s another gray midday in winter, months after the end of the World Series and still weeks from the beginning of spring training. The afternoon is sunless but somehow also hangover-bright, and your…

Illustration: Fala Atelier This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room. A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow…

Photo: Virgina Sherwood/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images One thing I used to like to do was walk outside while drinking coffee. I would not have put this on any list of my favorite activities, because I had not, until recently, considered it an “activity.” It was more…

Ranjan here. This week I’m going to be talking about the way Silicon Valley talks. Pop quiz: What is Goldman Sachs' motto? Or their corporate mission? We all know Google's Don't Be Evil. Or how Facebook is connecting the world. What is the pithy, high-minded statement that defines how Goldman Sachs…

Pivot To Image I had reached the point of diminishing returns. I wanted to quit Twitter, but my fingers were as if possessed, typing command+n, tw, return at any lull in the workday, letting autofill take care of the rest. Like an old woman who finds herself at a familiar bus stop in her nightgown,…

Photo illustrations by Zachary Scott He became America’s most reliable comic star without ever leaving his comfort zone. So what’s he doing in this year’s most anxiety-inducing film? Photo illustrations by Zachary ScottCredit... By Nov. 27, 2019 We cruised down West Pico in Adam Sandler’s ride, a…

In this op-ed, Lauren Michele Jackson tackles the recurring use of black people as reaction GIFs and its implications in terms of broader “digital blackface.” Adore or despise them, GIFs are integral to the social experience of the Internet. Thanks to a range of buttons, apps, and keyboards, saying…

Some of the following material appeared previously, in different form, in The New Yorker. Remove Ads * In the first fall of the Arab Spring, I moved with my family to Cairo. We came in October 2011, during the time of year when the light in the city begins to change. The days were still hot and…

This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. I met Eustace Conway through his little brother Judson, who is a young cowboy and a very good friend of mine. I used to work with Judson…

Updated at 10:25 a.m. ET on June 17, 2019. 1. The Disappearance At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator…

The pizza toast was like liturgy, like an old friend comforting me as I wept into my hands. The pizza toast was everything I needed it to be at the very moment it arrived. You see: I was in the middle of an epic walk across Japan. On this trip I was following the old Nakasendō historic highway, and…

Chris Anderson moves through the Target clearance racks with cool efficiency, surveying the towers of Star Wars Lego sets and Incredibles action figures, sensing, as if by intuition, what would be profitable to sell on Amazon. Discontinued nail polish can be astonishingly lucrative, but not these…

Big Endings The past year has felt like a peak in mega-budget world-spanning media spectacles that command our attention, one outrageous finale after another. On April 26, 2019, the film Avengers: Endgame was released in the United States. Less an original narrative than an accretion of capital,…

Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee.…

Search Personal History Life in Silicon Valley during the dawn of the unicorns. September 23, 2019 The first time I looked at a block of code and understood what was happening, I felt like a genius.Illustration by Elena Xausa Depending on whom you ask, 2012 represented the apex, the inflection…

Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic…

Our new issue, “Bye Bye Bidenism,” is out now. Subscribe to our print edition at a discounted rate today. Shawn Fain: Workers Deserve More Time for Themselves Shawn Fain Why Bidenism Failed Brent Cebul Lily Geismer Inflation Kills Governments Isabella Weber The Working Class Has Left the Building…

Hot Topic 🔥 Full coverage and conversation on Pride 2024 It’s night four of the cruise — karaoke night — and everybody’s been picking slow, sad songs. So I decide to wake the place up a little. The second dinner session has just let out, and the Rendezvous Lounge (which is as tacky as it sounds) is…

Modern Life Millennials who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science are fuelling a resurgence of the practice. October 21, 2019 A new generation of practitioners is meeting the public’s appetite for astrology.Illustration by Miguel Porlan On a Sunday night in June, the…

You know, of course, what the most grating and infuriating human behavior is. It is not when another person is simply being unreasonable. It is when that person is constantly insisting that they are Just Being Reasonable, and wondering why you’re acting so crazy and irrational, while they themselves…

You will know his work from his collaboration with Tina and Ryan Essmaker, designing the print version of The Great Discontent. And perhaps his designs for Microsoft, Starbucks, Adobe and Facebook. He's been recognised by the industry, too. In 2010, he was chosen as a Young Gun by the Art Directors…

So it’s settled, says Rob Pattinson, we’re going to do ayahuasca together! Ayahuasca is an Amazonian hallucinogen that people take to journey to the center of themselves, usually with a shaman, usually on a retreat, and it is a totally normal and valid way for us to spend one of our two days…