“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and a Short History of Movies about the Internet

Over the past year, public meetings have become scenes of chaos. Debates about the results of the 2020 election, race, abortion, voting access, and the COVID-19 vaccine have erupted in displays of fru...

16 Sep 202127min

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began less than three weeks after the September 11th attacks, and forces finally withdrew just weeks before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban are once aga...

13 Sep 202111min

Texas Senate Bill 8, known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” allows private citizens in Texas to sue anyone who aids in an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The law effectively outlaws the vas...

9 Sep 202123min

The child tax credit, received by more than thirty-five million families, isn’t entirely new. But the way it’s distributed is almost a revolution in American politics: instead of showing up once a yea...

6 Sep 202121min

America’s campaign in Afghanistan temporarily defeated Al Qaeda and unseated the Taliban government, but Al Qaeda remains a force in the region, and the speed with which the Taliban have reclaimed con...

3 Sep 202125min

One of the premier writers of thinky sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson opened his book “The Ministry for the Future” with an all too plausible scenario: a lethal heat wave descends on India, with vast, hor...

30 Aug 202118min

Jiayang Fan immigrated to the United States from China at age seven. Her mother, who had been a doctor, cleaned houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that Fan could attend good schools. In 2011, Fan’s ...

26 Aug 202125min

Dexter Filkins covered the American invasion of Afghanistan when he was a reporter for the New York Times, and has continued to report on conflicts in the region for The New Yorker. Filkins’s best-sel...

23 Aug 202116min