Schools in rich countries are making poor progress. They need to get back to basics, argues Mark Johnson
Hanging on to the best of them is getting harder
The actor talks about the origins of “Adaptation,” his potential leap to television, and the art of “keeping it enigmatic.”
By Susan Orlean
The wobbly distinction between reality and artifice fascinates Nicolas Cage. The first time we encountered each other was in 2001, during the making of “Adaptation”—a film based on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt my book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen—in which Cage played Kaufman and his twin, Donald. He was in the middle of a scene, and I tiptoed onto the set as quietly as possible, convinced that any distraction would trigger one of the eruptions for which Cage had become famous. Between takes, he glanced at the handful of people watching, and exclaimed cheerily, “Oh, guys, look!” He pointed at me and a small, fuzzy-haired man I hadn’t noticed beside me. “It’s the real Charlie and the real Susan!” He seemed tickled by this collision between the characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts, and insisted that the crew take note. (Kaufman and I, who had never met before that moment, slunk away sheepishly.)
Three decades into “This American Life,” the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of “The Daily.”
By Sarah Larson
It can be easy to take the greatness of “This American Life,” the weekly public-radio show and podcast hosted by Ira Glass, for granted. The show, which Glass co-founded in 1995 at WBEZ, in Chicago, has had the same essential format for twenty-eight years and more than eight hundred episodes. It was instrumental in creating a genre of audio journalism that has flourished in recent decades, especially since the podcast boom—which was initiated by the show’s first spinoff, “Serial,” in 2014. Like “The Daily Show” or Second City, “This American Life” has trained a generation of talented people, and Glass’s three-act structures, chatty cadences, and mixture of analysis and whimsy are now so familiar as to seem unremarkable.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 6, 2024): The latest issue features…
Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.
Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity.
His “X” trilogy — which culminates with “MaXXXine” — obsesses over cinema, stardom and the industry itself.
By RYAN BRADLEY
New York is trying to treat an addictive substance just like any other product.
By CHARLES FAIN LEHMAN
And so has the world in which they are used, says Shashank Joshi
Afew years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected cctv cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.
President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. By Jonathan Blitzer
Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
After the election, populists of the right and left could hobble a centrist president
He has a domestic agenda, but no easy way to bring it about
American fried chicken can now be served from the Philippines
Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it
Until recently, it wasn’t clear that the two men would ever share a stage again. Now there’s a potential for even greater stakes and strangeness than four years ago. By Evan Osnos
Neal ElAttrache, the surgeon to the stars of sport and screen, can fix anything. By Zach Helfand
Is the Pennsylvania senator trolling the left or offering a way forward for Democrats? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
REASON MAGAZINE (June 22, 2024) – The latest issue features The Debt Lies We Tell Ourselves….
Both parties—and the voters—are to blame for the national debt fiasco.
Georgia parents were accused of child abuse after they took their daughter to the doctor. Does the state’s story add up?
How legislators learned to stop worrying about the constitutionality of federal drug and gun laws by abusing the Commerce Clause
Thousands of people who helped the U.S. in Afghanistan are still looking for an escape.
An energy-rich future is within reach
The future of combat
Technology will make war faster and more opaque. It could
The character of warfare is about to be profoundly changed by artificial intelligence
Growth alone will not fix Britain’s public finances
A snap election in France reveals the flimsiness of his legacy
Wine collectors are at last taking champagne seriously
Before and after artificial intelligence
We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was,…
Can AI think creatively? Can we?
“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language…
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