The Best of The New Yorker

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

The technology, as it’s currently imagined, promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative imaginable?

The company’s founder, Luis von Ahn, believes that artificial intelligence is going to make computers better teachers than humans.

There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction.

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.

Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip invited readers to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.

If there is one cartooning accomplishment for which Charles Schulz should be credited, it’s that he brought into comics a broader visual language of emotion and empathy.

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.

Anthony Bourdain’s 1999 memoir about working in Manhattan restaurants. “Gastronomy is the science of pain. It was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place.”

How did the chain outdo Burger King’s Bacon Sundae, Pizza Hut’s hot-dog-stuffed crust, Cinnabon’s Pizzabon, and KFC’s fried-chicken-flavored nail polish?

New documents show that the M.I.T. Media Lab was aware of Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender, and that Epstein directed contributions to the lab far exceeding the amounts M.I.T. has publicly…

After the death of a reporter who investigated narcopolitics, her colleagues formed a secret collective to bring the killers to justice—and challenge a culture of impunity.

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

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,”»

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

Life in Silicon Valley during the dawn of the unicorns.

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.”

The Pakistani director Saim Sadiq’s sensuous film mounts an indictment of misogyny and transphobia without ever lecturing us.

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?

The tools we use to help us think—from language to smartphones—may be part of thought itself.