August 2013 Archives
-
Cabin Pressure
Now Boarding
More and more, we communicate today in short bursts of text. Letters may be dead, but we still write to each other constantly. A man considers what could be his last words to his children from a departing airplane.
-
National Intelligents
Our Bad
In light of the ongoing Snowden leak, the National Security Agency has begun mailing apology notes to private citizens. However, since it did take the time to read your correspondence, advice may be included.
-
Gallery
Totem Goals
Modern-day totem poles constructed from Americans’ favorite consumer materials—cars, beer cans, even cheeseburgers.
-
Press Pause
Explaining the Inexplicable
Readers of science reporting often find their heads spinning. Some of the science reporters do, too. A look at how the best of them make inexpertise an asset.
-
Spoofs & Satire
Natural Born Tourists
When a vacation rental doesn’t live up to expectations, when that “charming Montauk cabin” turns out to be a shed, one family’s solution is passive-aggressive guestbook commentary.
-
Gallery
True West
Irresistible watercolors of mouthy cowboys, automobile wrecks, boxing matches, rodeo clowns, and rock bands.
-
Press Pause
The Best Ways to Ask Questions
On a March day in 2002, Walter Cronkite, Mikhail Gorbachev, Iggy Pop, and Donald Trump were all in the same New York City studio, on West 15th Street. The reason? Each...
-
TMN Weekender
Cleavage
Egypt’s transition to a new military-backed government after the ouster of Mohammed Morsi took a violent turn this week after several hundred supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi...
-
Roundtables
It’s the End of the World as We’ve Known It
Good old Earth was nearly destroyed, almost extinguished, and threatened with slaughter every hour in cinemas this summer. And yet, here we are. Our film critics pinpoint the collapse of the apocalypse genre.
-
City Fields
Train Operator
The city of New York employs nearly half a million citizens, more than any other municipality in the country. We decided to speak with some of those employees about their...
-
Great American Games
No One Is Innocent
Think baseball today is rotten from drugs and punks? A century ago, things weren’t much better. A brief history of baseball’s dark traditions—cheating, substance abuse, obscenity, violence—and the colorful players who brought them to life.
-
Naming Today
Rumors of Tribes
At one school, the popular girls were called the “chicken patties,” but the jocks were just the “jocks.” How teenage crowds get named.
-
TMN Weekender
The Great Migration
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks on the transit beat. A shark turned up on the N train. A ride on the Q inspired an an epic...
-
Personal Histories
The Works and Days of Elena Shvarts
A literary gumshoe visits St. Petersburg to track down the so-called “ninja of Russian verse,” Elena Shvarts, who died in 2010 leaving almost nothing behind.
-
Press Pause
Checking Facts Like Freddie and Eleanor
For 45 years, Freddie Packard worked for the New Yorker as a “checker,” and for two decades he ran the magazine’s fact-checking department. Packard knew at least...
-
Terrify My City
Chiraq, Drillinois
Originating on the South Side, drill music has attracted major labels to Chicago in search of young rappers—as gang violence turns the city into the murder capital. Each has everything to do with the other.
-
We Watch Channel Zero
Adjusting the Picture
Some of the best TV shows these days, whether we’re watching them on television sets or online, are being compared to novels—and even sonnets. A chat with some of the leading thinkers in TV writing to find out what comes next.
-
Gallery
The Tension of Today
Square paintings that take the smallest things—a gas station’s roof, a swing set’s leg—and find unease in the most cheerful of circumstances.
-
The Statistics Desk
E Pluribus, Gen X
Generation X has always been able to fashion its own best outcome. Now it’s time to take that DIY attitude and fix the nation. Because you know who really won the American Revolution? That’s right: Slackers.
-
TMN Weekender
This Is How We Do It Now
On Wednesday Russia granted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum for a year, while earlier this week a military court found WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy,...
-
Press Pause
Finding Boundaries to Cross
I spent my first day as a news editor circling a 750-acre farm in Virginia, where the body of a college student had surfaced months after she’d disappeared...
-
Spoofs & Satire
Put These on My Byline
In line at the grocery store, the economics of online writing.