Month: July 2019

With Donald Trump using his Twitter feed as a flamethrower on a daily basis, other significant developments, particularly policy ones, often don’t get the attention they deserve. Take last week’s G.D.P. report from the Commerce Department, which detailed a sharp slowdown in capital spending by American businesses during the second quarter of this year. To…

Give this to the Democrats, at least: they’ve chosen the sites for their Presidential debates brilliantly. The first round, last month, was in Miami—a twenty-first-century city in both hopeful and bleak ways, with a population that resembles the hemisphere and rising seas lapping at the streets, where the candidates, with a morning off, staged protests…

If you wanted to make a lot of money, quickly, you could not have done much better than to have bought bitcoin in September, 2017. At the time, the cryptocurrency was trading at just under four thousand dollars; three months later, it topped out at more than nineteen thousand dollars. Bitcoin’s volatility (it is now…

It’s a sign of the psychic costs of America’s ongoing epidemic of gun massacres that we have all learned to parse the casualties of the latest gun massacre within the frame of all the gun massacres that have gone before. People discussing what will become known as the Gilroy Garlic Festival massacre, which occurred on…

This article was published in partnership with ProPublica and The Trace. In 2018, accountants for the National Rifle Association began cataloguing for its board of directors questionable financial arrangements that had led to millions of dollars in payments to a group of the organization’s top executives and consultants. The N.R.A. was experiencing cash-flow problems, and…

This past Wednesday, during Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Ratcliffe, a Republican from Texas who was previously a federal prosecutor, accused the former special counsel of illegally smearing President Trump. Ratcliffe demanded to know why Mueller had stated in Volume II of his report—which investigated whether the President had obstructed…

Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write a novel, about a mystery that takes the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen…

Jackson Pollock’s “Mural,” an eight-by-twenty-foot painting that the artist completed in 1943, has been on a continuous world tour since 2014. It’s travelled a lot of miles. Legally, the painting belongs to the state of Iowa, because the University of Iowa is where it ended up after Peggy Guggenheim, the person who commissioned it, left…

Last September, two Cuban government handlers took me to a neuroscience-research institute in Havana to meet with Mitchell Joseph Valdés-Sosa, a jovial scientist who emigrated to Cuba from the United States when he was eleven. Valdés-Sosa was part of a team of prominent Cuban medical experts that was set up by the government in response…

In her second cover for the magazine, Olimpia Zagnoli presents a pastel portrait of summer—and of a technique some people use to beat the heat. We recently talked to Zagnoli, who lives in Milan, about her thoughts on the season. You were born and raised in Italy. Do you prefer ice cream or gelato? Gelato!…