Facebook’s False Standards for Not Removing a Fake Nancy Pelosi Video
Last week, when a doctored video of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began circulating on Facebook, it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before it was removed. After all, just one day before, Facebook proudly announced that it had recently removed 2.2 billion fake accounts between January and March…
Ayşegül Savaş Reads “Canvas”
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn Ayşegül Savaş reads her story from the June 3, 2019, issue of the magazine. Savaş is a Turkish writer who lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne. Her first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling,” was published in April. Click Here:
Ann Reinking on Her Life as Bob Fosse’s Muse, Lover, and Friend
It’s an odd feeling to give someone a spoiler alert for her own life story, but I didn’t want to ruin “Fosse/Verdon” for Ann Reinking. As of last week, the veteran dancer had not caught up with the FX miniseries, starring Sam Rockwell as the louche director-choreographer Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as the Broadway…
Additional Modern Families to Replace ABC’s “Modern Family”
The hit sitcom “Modern Family” is set to end next year. But fear not. There are any number of other modern families to observe, now that our long-running favorite is disbanding, including the following: A Guatemalan child is held at a border detention facility in Arizona; his parents are held at a border detention facility…
“See You Yesterday” and the Perils—and Promise—of Time-Travelling While Black
Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the…
Ayşegül Savaş on Imitation and Identity
In “Canvas” the narrator, a graduate student, is renting an apartment from an older woman, an artist named Agnes. The artist has arranged to use her studio there whenever she visits the city, yet while the two women sometimes share the same space, they barely know each other. What does that type of relationship—one of…
The Impeccably Understated Modernism of I. M. Pei
In John Updike’s story “Gesturing,” first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. “The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,” Updike writes, “famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to…