You know so much more about yourself and your desires when you’re older that dating apps — even with all their frustrations — can bring unanticipated pleasure.
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.
Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.
On the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, the super PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis staged a “drop by” for the candidate at its headquarters in West Des Moines. Outside the modernist office park, much of the Upper Midwest was under a deep freeze brought on by a low-pressure system that had deposited more than a foot of snow in advance of a surge of arctic air that brought the wind chill into the negative thirties. Despite the atrocious road conditions, DeSantis was keeping his schedule as a “special guest” of the Never Back Down PAC, beginning the day at the far western end of Iowa, in Council Bluffs, and concluding it three hundred miles east, in Davenport.
The New Yorker (April 15, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresAna Juan’s “Clickbait” – The artist captures the mesmerizing—and distracting—glow of modern entertainment.
Can the World Be Simulated?
Video-game engines were designed to closely mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used for movies, TV shows, architecture, military trainings, virtual reality, and the metaverse.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president. Now he finds himself leading Trump’s first prosecution — and perhaps the only one before the November election.
The Playwright Who Fearlessly Reimagines America
In her new play, ‘Sally & Tom,’ Suzan-Lori Parks brings exuberant provocation to the gravest historical questions.
The New Yorker (April 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Pascal Campion’s “Into the Light” – The artist depicts stepping out of the subway into the overwhelming glow of the city.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
A new, high-tech approach called ECPR can restart more hearts and save more lives. Why aren’t more hospitals embracing it?
By Helen Ouyang
Greg Hayes, an emergency first responder in Chanhassen, Minn., was picking up takeout sushi when a 911 call came in: A 61-year-old had stopped breathing at home. Hayes and his team jumped in their ambulance and were soon pulling up in front of a suburban two-story house, where paramedics and other first responders were also arriving. All of them grabbed their equipment and raced through the open garage to find a man, gray and still, on the living-room floor with his wife and stepdaughter nearby.
When people think about stages of life that can strain relationships, they often reflect on the first sleepless years of child rearing or the phase of parenting that involves rebellious teens. Retirement, typically anticipated as a time of relaxation, might not come to mind, but this transition away from work can also be stressful, coinciding with reinventions and re-evaluations that can cause couples to suddenly experience new tensions. It can also be a time of renewed connection and relationship growth. Often, it’s both at once.
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