THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (October 1, 2023):
Josh Koskoff’s legal victory against Remington has raised the possibility of a new form of gun control: lawsuits against the companies that make assault rifles.
Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 22, 2023): The 9.24.23 Issue features Hannah Dreier on migrant children working in dangerous conditions; McKenzie Funk on Hank Asher, a drug smuggler who became a pioneer in data mining; Sonia Shah on new research that suggests animals are saying more than we think; and more.
Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.
Can a mouse learn a new song?
Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard mice sing, because they do so in frequencies beyond the range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather than the mutable expressions of individual minds.
Real-deal Tunisian harissa is an anchor to the motherland and a bright, specific accent to countless dishes.
By Eric Kim
Last year, UNESCO officially deemed harissa, the brick red, aromatic chile paste, “an integral part of domestic provisions and the daily culinary and food traditions of Tunisian society.” Keyword: Tunisian.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 17, 2023): The 9.17.23 Issue features Emily Bazelon on abortion rights being won through state ballots after the Dobbs decision; Audra D.S. Burch on the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado and the city’s deep divide over policing; Teju Cole on Greek tragedies; Dan Brooks on the Italian rock band Måneskin; and more.
After Dobbs, the political ground seems to be shifting in some unpredictable ways.
By EMILY BAZELON
After Elijah McClain died in 2019, the case seemed to be closed. The George Floyd protests — and the backlash to them — would change everything.
One by one, the five men — three police officers and two paramedics — walked up before the judge one afternoon this January. Their lawyers stood beside them, and the wooden benches of the Colorado courtroom were filled with family, friends and fellow police officers and paramedics.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 10, 2023): The Education Issue features Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?; Affirmative Action Is Still in Effect. For Men, and more….
For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.
By Paul Tough
A decade or so ago, Americans were feeling pretty positive about higher education. Public-opinion polls in the early 2010s all told the same story. In one survey, 86 percent of college graduates said that college had been a good investment; in another, 74 percent of young adults said a college education was “very important”; in a third, 60 percent of Americans said that colleges and universities were having a positive impact on the country. Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college.
Declining male enrollment has led some colleges to adopt an unofficial policy that many find objectionable: “We need to admit men, and women are going to suffer.”
In the spring of 2021, about 2,000 students on the campus of Tulane University in New Orleans received an email they were expecting. They had filled out an elaborate survey provided by Marriage Pact, a matchmaking service popular on many campuses, and the day had come for each of them to be given the name of a fellow student who might be a long-term romantic partner. When the results came in, however, about 900 straight women who participated were surprised by what the email offered: a friend match instead of a love interest.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (September 3, 2023) – The 9.3.23 Issue features Michael Steinberger on how the war in Ukraine turned tennis into a battlefield; Keri Blakinger on the Dungeons and Dragons players on death row; Jennifer Szalai on Naomi Klein’s new book about her doppelganger; and more.
For Ukrainian players, as well as those from Russia and its allies, the unceasing conflict at home has bled into the game. Now they face off at the U.S. Open.
By Michael Steinberger
It was a few days before the start of Wimbledon this summer, and Elina Svitolina, just off a flight from Geneva, had come to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club to check in for the tournament. She was returning after a year’s absence. “It feels like it has been 10 years,” she said as she got out of the car. A lot had happened since she last competed at Wimbledon, in 2021. She had given birth to a daughter named Skaï, the first child for her and her husband, the French player Gaël Monfils. Also, her country, Ukraine, had been invaded by Russia.
If you’re Naomi Klein, you write a book about it.
In June, the Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein was sitting in the dark gray booth of a recording studio in Lower Manhattan. Dressed simply for the New York City heat — white linen top, light cropped pants, white sneakers — she was reading from a script, and there was a line that was giving her a bit of trouble.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 27, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Jen Percy reports on what people misunderstand about rape. Plus, the case that could unravel an art dynasty and a Harvard professor who is also an alien hunter.
Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.
By Jen Percy
There’s a lingua franca that women use, a repeated vocabulary to describe what they experience and think during a sexual assault. Variations of “freezing” are often part of that vocabulary. But the word has so many referents in its colloquial usage that it’s hard to know precisely what it means to each person saying it.
“I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said in the documentary “Pretty Baby,” describing how she felt when being raped. “And I just thought, Stay alive and get out.”
How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.
By Rachel Corbett
Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 20, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, what are “forever chemicals” and what are they doing to us? Plus, inside the racism scandal that rocked an affluent town’s high school and checking in with the dancehall star Sean Paul.
PFAS lurk in so much of what we eat, drink and use. Scientists are only beginning to understand how they’re impacting our health — and what to do about them.
By Kim Tingley
The Faroe Islands, an incongruous speckling of green in the North Atlantic, are about as far away as you can hope to get on Earth from a toxic-waste dump, time zones distant from the nearest population centers (Norway to the east, Iceland to the west). Pál Weihe was born in the Faroes and has lived there for most of his life. He is a public-health authority for the nation, population around 53,000; chairman of the Faroese Medical Association and chief physician of the Department of Occupational Medicine and Public Health in the Faroese hospital system. He is also vice chairman of the Faroe Islands Art Society; a widower; a grandfather. A crumpled funeral program and half-empty juice boxes share space in the back seat of his Land Cruiser.
By David Marchese
Matthieu Ricard is an ordained Buddhist monk and an internationally best-selling author of books about altruism, animal rights, happiness and wisdom. His humanitarian efforts led to his homeland’s awarding him the French National Order of Merit. (Ricard’s primary residence is a Nepalese monastery.) He was the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter and holds a Ph.D in cellular genetics. In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Ricard’s brain produced gamma waves — which have been linked to learning, attention and memory — at such pronounced levels that the media named him “the world’s happiest man.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE – The 8.13.23 Issue: In this special issue, Wesley Morris on hip-hop’s 50th anniversary; Niela Orr on the ascendance of female rappers; Miles Marshall Lewis on how hip-hop changed the English language forever; Daniel Levin Becker on the history of bling; Tom Breihan on Too Short’s long career; and Danyel Smith on the rappers we lost.
By MILES MARSHALL LEWIS
In just 50 years, rap has transformed the way the world speaks. Here are five words that tell the story of the genre’s linguistic power.
“I stay woke” — Erykah Badu, “Master Teacher”
We’re celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this week. Wesley Morris traces the art form from its South Bronx origins to all-encompassing triumph.
As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun.
By Niela Orr
Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is suffering, too. If the music were any more existentially morose, or stylistically comatose, mainstream hip-hop made by men might be headed the way of hair metal or disco. The narcotized indolence is everywhere; the recounting of opioid abuse is so blasé (the Percs, Xans and Oxys) that these pillbox litanies leave you wondering if the Sackler family sponsored a wing in the rap museum. And then there’s the sense of foreshortened future that’s baked into the genre but has been amplified as gangsta rap branched off into trap, drill and other grittier subgenres. Many of the male rappers are documenting social strife and commenting on the violence that comes with being young, Black, famous men. This thread can be moving and also heartbreaking. When listening to these songs, it is impossible to not ache for their makers, to be afraid right along with them. But the music bears the weight of all that anxiety and grief. Even the occasional Drake smash is not enough to disturb the disquiet.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 6, 2023) –
Many writers are looking for ways to capture the everyday realities that the government keeps hidden — sometimes at their own peril.
By Han Zhang
On an August evening in 2021, the best-selling Chinese novelist Hao Qun, who writes under the name Murong Xuecun, was procrastinating in his one-bedroom apartment. He needed to be at Beijing Capital International Airport around 6 the next morning to catch a flight to London, but he found it hard to pack. Though Hao had a valid tourist visa to Britain, the Chinese government had kept tabs on him for years, and it was possible that he would be prevented from leaving; other public intellectuals had tried to travel abroad only to discover that they were under exit bans. Hao might have been packing for a life of exile or a futile trip to the airport.
It was an explosive claim — that a Virginia school district covered up a crime in order to protect transgender rights. But was it true?
For months a sort of aerosolized fury had hung over the Loudoun County school district. There were fights over Covid closures and mask mandates, over racial-equity programs, over library books. Now, in the weeks before the school board’s meeting on June 22, 2021, attention had shifted to a new proposal: Policy 8040, which would let transgender students choose pronouns, play sports and use bathrooms in accordance with their declared gender identity. In May, an elementary-school gym teacher announced that as a “servant of God,” he felt he could not follow the policy. The district swiftly suspended him — and just as swiftly, the antennae of conservative media outlets and politicians swiveled toward Loudoun County.
The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on helping people who are institutionalized against their will.
By Kwame Anthon
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (July 30, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, David Quammen reports on the ongoing mystery of Covid’s origin, what we do know — and why it matters. Plus, a profile of a poet who was kidnapped from his Black father by his white grandparents and a look at a group of English activists’ fight for the right to access public lands.
We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here’s what we do know — and why it matters.
By David Quammen
Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China.
A group of English activists want to legally enshrine the “right to roam” — and spread the idea that nature is a common good.
By Brooke Jarvis
The signs on the gate at the entrance to the path and along the edge of the reservoir were clear. “No swimming,” they warned, white letters on a red background.
On a chill mid-April day in northwest England, with low, gray clouds and rain in the forecast, the signs hardly seemed necessary. But then people began arriving, by the dozens and then the hundreds. Some walked only from nearby Hayfield, while others came by train or bus or foot from many hours away. In a long, trailing line, they tramped up the hill beside the dam and around the shore of the reservoir, slipping in mud and jumping over puddles. Above them rose a long, curving hill of open moorland, its heather still winter brown. When they came to a gap between a stone wall and a metal fence, they squeezed through it, one by one, slipping under strings of barbed wire toward the water below.
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