The Best of The New Yorker

Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

As chatbots threaten their own best sources of data, they will have to find new kinds of knowledge.

China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.

Bolstered by Oprah, a Harvard Business School professor thinks you should run your inner self like a company.

Bill Watterson’s return to print, after nearly three decades, comes in the form of a fable called “The Mysteries,” which shares with his famous comic strip a sense of enchantment.

Maybe one day journalism could be replaced with an immense surveillance state with a GPT-4 plug-in. Why would we want that?

Reviews of the year’s notable new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can’t resist it. But does this trope deepen characters, or flatten them into a set of symptoms?

Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.

The rediscovery of demos performed by the songwriters of the legendary Memphis recording studio reveals a hidden history of soul.

He’s in his eighties. How does he keep it fresh?

How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.

A country that cannot even agree to investigate an assault on its Capitol is in big trouble, indeed.

«When Joe Biden was a Presidential candidate, he carried around a wonkish book of international comparative politics by two Harvard professors, “How Democracies Die,”»

In the extraordinary “Recitatif,” Morrison withholds crucial details of racial identity, making the reader the subject of her experiment.

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely encompassing term of description.

An expert on Stalin discusses Putin, Russia, and the West.

For years, the political scientist has claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused by Western intervention. Have recent events changed his mind?

Silicon Valley fails to take into account the human consequences of its technological wizardry.

Can a human touch make Silicon Valley’s biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place?

Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”

In an era when “pre-awareness” rules Hollywood, the company is ginning up plots for everything from Hot Wheels to UNO.

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.

How the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump’s ties to Russia.

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

There’s a general sense that social media is harmful—and that may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers.

Two new books examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.

«According to Smith, the Internet actually limits attention, in the sense of a deep aesthetic experience that changes the person who is engaging.»

Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them?

OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?