How the Mayor Could Answer the Ferry Question
In a fight over a shuttered terminal, the city’s longest-serving official has one instrument left at his disposal.
Captive-bred atlas moths, with candy-bright scales and improbable markings, are now prized above their brown-and-ochre cousins in the wild. Breeders and collectors find in them an irresistible mix of clickbait, dream collectible, spreadsheet hobby, and living art. Marisol Vane reports.
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Essential reading for today.
In a fight over a shuttered terminal, the city’s longest-serving official has one instrument left at his disposal.
Bomani Weke, the leader of the Malawian opposition—and the subject of a short-listed documentary—meets the film world.
The Justices will decide whether a clause written in 1911 is enough to keep the port authority out of the deal.
The musician behind the streaming mainstay “Late Frost” on small-town life, using his phone too much, and the loneliness of a sold-out room.
Our City Correspondents
Lawsuits. Unpermitted kitchens. Landlords rushing in. The messy rollout of a law that tried to hand the ground floor back to the neighborhood.
ListenProfiles
The freshman from Nevada is among the most brazen and divisive figures in his party. He is also, by a wide margin, the most imitated.
ListenOpinions, arguments, and reflections on the news.
The Meridian Interview
The comic on love, stagefright, and why her new special is mostly about her knees.
Personal History
At thirteen, I went to sleepaway camp, consumed by crushes, a borrowed Discman, and my father’s worsening illness.
Reporting and analysis on the race for City Hall.
The former mayor has already lost the case twice, but he has also won something.
The governor’s transit chief has had to answer for an unprecedented year of delays. Why are councilmembers moving to remove him?
Will the county prosecutor’s private life derail her effort to bring the case to trial?
Consider yourself warned.
Pause and peruse a gallery of drawings from the issue »
Photo Booth
In a new series of collages made by hand and by software, Voss is as unrecognizable as she has ever been, yet the figures she stages cannot be pried loose from her.
Books
Armies burned them; armies shipped them to the front. Alexander, Napoleon, and Stalin were all keen bibliophiles. How to make sense of any of it?
Page-Turner
Where we shop for books, and why we always stay too long.
The Theatre
Sara Gantcher’s “The Troll Farm” and Nadia Deniz’s “My Mother at Full Scale” look for truth in a world of lies.
Page-Turner
For decades the pursuit belonged to first-wave feminists and bored housewives. How did it come to be defined by a stubborn gender gap?
Infinite Scroll
The new spy picture suggests the contortions a production must undergo to justify its own existence.
Listening Booth
Reyes’s new album and its accompanying film promise an odyssey into her heart, but the love story is only coyly her own.
Under Review
Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.
There are very few rules protecting the people who give law enforcement information.
Has criticism of applied behavior analysis gone too far?
New books provide histories of an old argument and offer alternate ways forward.
Biologists aim to engineer crops that can eat nitrogen straight from the air.
Persons of Interest
Tomas Brenner, a ruthless dissector of unwarranted assumptions, takes on the catastrophists and the techno-optimists alike.
The Weekend Essay
The work of the director Dana Crevecoeur proposes that transformation can attend disgust, and that our desires might be elevated only when we are taken apart.
A four-episode narrative series, from The Quiet Room, on the women of a shipping dynasty.
Why the daughters of the family’s patriarch decided to leave the compound.
After Amira was caught trying to flee, her sister Nadira decided to make her own attempt.
Aboard a yacht off the coast, Nadira was briefly free. Then men in masks stormed the boat.
Nadira was captured and returned home. Secret recordings shed light on what came next.
The Meridian Documentary
A short documentary by Nicola Fenn follows a video-app performer who becomes a national figure during a war.
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Enter this week’s contest »In Case You Missed It
Personal History
Annals of Artificial Intelligence
Our City Correspondents
Fiction
By Jamil Arian Kovach
Illustration by Sophie Harrington
Through no fault of our own (naturally), we were late. Our wives, you see, had decided to come along. And although we did not, in general, bring our women to namings, Haji Rasul’s wife had sent each of ours a personal invitation online, which they lorded over us, until, inevitably, we found ourselves waiting in empty living rooms or pacing back and forth on dreary porches, every few minutes shouting up the stairs. Continue reading »
This Week in Fiction
Jamil Arian Kovach on a shared cultural language
The Writer’s Voice
The author reads “On the Night of the Naming”
Louisa Thorne
The Case for a Rookie’s Swagger
Maris Geller
The Long Shadow of a Vanished Opposition
Conrad Bailey
A Judge Lowers the Boom on the Developers
Elias Korda
Can the Coalition Still Hold?