The Magic of Bird Brains
At around 9 A.M. every weekday, a crow caws in the Jardin des Plantes, the oldest botanical garden in Paris. The sound is a warning to every other crow:…
At around 9 A.M. every weekday, a crow caws in the Jardin des Plantes, the oldest botanical garden in Paris. The sound is a warning to every other crow:…
Not long ago, I randomly opened Vaclav Smil’s recent book “Size: How It Explains the World.” The first paragraph I read, in a chapter about good and bad design,…
After Zac Brettler died, his parents struggled to decode the mystery of what had happened to him. They thought that they could pinpoint the moment he’d started…
When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. “I really liked being there,” she says. She’d read books to her…
“Should I be allowed to make this said?” Blake Butler writes in his new memoir, “ Molly .” By the time he asks, it’s too late. He has already written more than…
1 / 4 Illustration by Dorothy Lake Gregory The second time that Gertrude Chandler Warner published “The Boxcar Children,” a tale of four orphaned adventurers…
New Yorker Favorites First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess . The unravelling of an expert on serial killers . What exactly happened…
Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help…
The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation, and…
From the issue of July 31, 2023 It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the…
Last summer, with the momentousness of a gender-reveal party and the exuberance of a ticker-tape parade, the United States Army announced its first combat-ready…
There’s an old video of the pitcher Daniel Bard that still surfaces from time to time. It’s a scorching Monday afternoon in August, 2010. The Red Sox are facing…
When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on…
Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is…
I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to…
The English Premier League season is thirty-eight games long. For many years, it was axiomatic that, in order to prosper, teams needed a striker who could score…
Several people have asked me what I thought of the op-ed that John Jackson, the prosecutor in the Willingham case, recently published in the Corsicana Daily Sun…
“Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it,” a U.N. official has said. Illustration by BACHELOT CARON…
For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a…
Subscribe » A Reporter At Large February 12 & 19, 2018 The White Darkness A solitary journey across Antarctica. I. Mortal Danger T he man felt like a speck in…
Conservative movements to reform education are often defined by what they’re against. At a recent public briefing, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis,…
The Devils River, in southwestern Texas, runs, mirage-like, along the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, through some of the most barren countryside in the United…
Typhoons. Scurvy. Shipwreck. Mutiny. Cannibalism. A war over the truth and who gets to write history. All of these elements converge in David Grann’s upcoming…
Pennsylvania Station, in west midtown, is the busiest railroad station in the Western Hemisphere. It is also a shabby, haunted labyrinth. I was there recently…
In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the…
How a massive painting by Charles Addams wended its way from a Hamptons hotel to a university library.
In the winter of 2002, a young American named Ryan Neil joined an unusual pilgrimage: he and several others flew to Tokyo, to begin a tour of Japan’s finest…