Facebook’s Audacious Pitch for a Global Cryptocurrency
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…
The Gilroy Shooting and What the Democratic Candidates Should Remember About Justice John Paul Stevens
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…
New Documents Raise Ethical and Billing Concerns About the N.R.A.’s Outside Counsel
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…
Trump’s Message to U.S. Intelligence Officials: Be Loyal or Leave
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…
Tana French on “The Witch Elm”
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…
A Clear Look at Jackson Pollock’s Breakthrough Painting, “Mural”
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…
Brain Scans Shed New Light on Mysterious Attacks on U.S. Diplomats and Spies in Havana
Click:Car diagnostic tool 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…
Olimpia Zagnoli’s “A Taste of Summer”
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!…
Don’t Worry About the Democratic Presidential Polls
Exactly twelve years ago, on July 29, 2007, national opinion polls declared the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination to be one Rudolph Giuliani, the bombastic former New York City mayor. In second place, seven points back, was a retired Tennessee senator and actor, Fred Thompson. Languishing in third place, another five points behind, was…
Elizabeth Strout on Returning to Olive Kitteridge
Your story in this week’s issue, “Motherless Child,” revolves around Olive Kitteridge, who was the protagonist of your 2008 story collection, “Olive Kitteridge,” and will be the protagonist of a sequel, “Olive, Again,” which comes out this fall. What made you want to go back to Olive (or move forward with her)? I never intended…