THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 23, 2023) – In this issue, Christopher Cox on the risk that California’s dams will fail; Charlie Savage on his connection to Pink Floyd and “The Wizard of Oz”; Dan Kois on Lorrie Moore; and more.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 16, 2023) – Three young Iranian women share their diaries; plus, a profile of the YouTube superstar MrBeast; and inside the moral crisis of America’s doctors.
The corporatization of health care has changed the practice of medicine, causing many physicians to feel alienated from their work.
By Eyal Press
Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn’t have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records.
Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, has become a viral sensation for his absurd acts of altruism. Why do so many people think he’s evil?
Even within this context, Donaldson stands out for his dedication to understanding how YouTube works. For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 09, 2023) – Inside the $4-billion credit repair industry. Plus, the mycologist who wants us to learn about the magic of mushrooms and the cringe comedian perfect for this moment.
Taqwanna Clark, a credit-repair agent in Houston and the founder of Credit Lift Inc.Credit…Eli Durst for The New York Times
Desperate to improve their ratings, Americans now spend billions on “credit repair” — but the industry often can’t deliver on its promises.
By Mya Frazier
When Taqwanna Clark went to buy a video camera at Fry’s Electronics in Houston, she asked if they had a layaway plan. The cashier instead handed her an application for a store credit card. She applied. “Instantly, it came back declined — like, No!” she says. “Denied, denied — you know, your credit is not good enough.” Clark was 30 and working as a security guard at the Port of Houston. On weekends, she performed as a rapper in the local club scene, under the name T-Baby. She wanted the camera to shoot music videos, to promote her music career. “If I can’t afford a $200 camera,” she recalls thinking, “then I’m in a bad way with this credit thing.”
Merlin Sheldrake, author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life.”
A vast fungal web braids together life on Earth. Merlin Sheldrake wants to help us see it.
By Jennifer Kahn
One evening last winter, Merlin Sheldrake, the mycologist and author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life,” was headlining an event in London’s Soho. The night was billed as a “salon,” and the crowd, which included the novelist Edward St. Aubyn, was elegant and arty, with lots of leggy women in black tights and men in perfectly draped camel’s-hair coats. “Entangled Life” is a scientific study of all things fungal that reads like a fairy tale, and since the book’s publication in 2020, Sheldrake has become a coveted speaker.
This minor fact is one of the major things I learned at my very awkward dinner interview with Robinson and Zach Kanin, creators of the cult Netflix comedy series “I Think You Should Leave.” Robinson ordered drunken spaghetti with tofu — spicy — and, almost immediately, the spaghetti started to make his voice hoarse. He insisted, however, that this had nothing to do with the spice — in fact, he said, his food wasn’t spicy enough. I asked our server if she could go spicier. She brought out a whole dish of special chiles. Robinson spooned them enthusiastically over his noodles.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 4, 2023) – California is the place where the future happens, for good and ill. That’s part of its magic. Read our first-ever California Issue to find out what roads the state will take us down next.
Inside: A fight over a parking lot that explains the housing crisis; the future of California’s power to shape national policy; how the state is adapting to a warming world — and more.
From reparations to tax revolts, the Golden State tries out new ideas all the time. What roads will its latest experiments send us down?
By Laila Lalami
I remember my first glimpse into the future. In August 1992, when I arrived in California as a student, I discovered during orientation that the university required all incoming students to have something called an email account. To access it, I had to call up a text-based mail client on Unix, using a series of line commands. If I needed a file that sat on a university computer in New York, I could use file transfer protocol to download it in Los Angeles, the whole process taking no more than a few minutes. That’s brilliant, I remember thinking.
For a while this winter, seemingly every text message that Buffy Wicks received asked if she was running for Congress. Representative Barbara Lee, of California’s 12th District, which includes Oakland, had announced that she would enter the race for Dianne Feinstein’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. This decision by Lee, who is 76, created a rare opportunity for the next generation of California Democrats to vie for federal office. And Wicks — a 45-year-old State Assembly member who lives in Lee’s district and was last re-elected with 85 percent of the vote — seemed like a natural candidate.
Welcome to Vienna, where a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. What can America learn from a city that has largely avoided the housing crisis?
The violence of his era can be found in his serene masterpieces — if you know where to look.
The afternoon I discovered Vermeer, I was passing time by browsing the books and publications piled up on the shelves at home in Lagos. I was 14 or 15. Amid the relics of my parents’ college studies (Nigerian plays, French histories, business-management textbooks), I found something unfamiliar: the annual report for a multinational company. I don’t remember which company it was, but it must have had something to do with food or drink, because on the front cover was a painting of peasants in a rolling field and on the back was a painting of a woman pouring milk.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 21, 2023) – Sometimes it seems as if everyone is in therapy. And the language of therapy is certainly everywhere these days. So we dedicated this year’s Health Issue to a topic on all our minds.
Research shows that counseling delivers great benefits to many people. But it’s hard to say exactly what that means for you.
In my late 20s, living alone in New York, I found myself in the grip of a dark confusion, unclear of how to proceed — and so I started seeing a therapist. During most visits, I sat in a chair with a box of tissues on the small table beside it, but the office also held a couch, on which I occasionally reclined, staring at the ceiling as I wrestled with what I was doing with my life, and even what I was doing in that office.
Somatic therapy is surging, with the promise that true healing may reside in focusing on the physical rather than the mental.
I had been describing a looming fear about my writing, about encroaching failure. Price sat in front of a dangling plant in her home office in Austin, Texas. With her red-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her delicate features communicated a mix of candor and vulnerability that created a sense of shared space, of intimacy, even by Zoom. She listened, took notes and, with a gesture of her hand, suggested that we leave my account of the situation off to the side.
The New York Times Magazine – May 14, 2023: Katie Engelhart reports on a family torn apart by dementia; plus, we take you inside the world of saildrones — the unmanned boats that measure superstorms at sea — and Jazmine Hughes reports on one woman’s efforts to ensure the conviction of the white supremacist who killed her sister in the Buffalo shooting last year.
Court hearings, media scrums, ruined holidays — Barbara Massey-Mapps suffered through it all to see the white supremacist who killed her sister convicted.
“I would never in my life crack under pressure,” the recently declared independent says. “Why would they think I’m going to do it?”Credit…Ashley Gilbertson/VII for The New York Times
What the Arizona senator’s breakup with the Democrats means for American politics.
Kyrsten Sinema was standing a few yards from the border wall with four Republican members of Congress. The men were staring balefully at a row of nearby portable toilets, wondering aloud if they could hold out for a proper bathroom on the way back to the airport.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.Credit…Michal Chelbin for The New York Times
School closures and culture wars turned classrooms into battlegrounds — and made the head of one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions a lightning rod for criticism.
Detectives Art Walkley, left, and Karoline Keith and Sgt. Jeff Covello, crime-scene investigators for the Connecticut State Police.Credit…Elinor Carucci for The New York Times
The crime-scene investigators are the ones who document, and remember, the unimaginable. This is what they saw at Sandy Hook.
Boomers Daily 