Ethel Mary Smyth Hulton Archive/Getty Images T his month at the Metropolitan Opera , audiences can see and hear, for the first time there in over a century, an opera composed by a woman — Kaija Saariaho's “L’Amour de Loin.” The milestone is shocking — and it can be explained, if not fully justified.…

A perfectly ripe strawberry sitting in a lab at a startup in Santa Barbara, California, looks and tastes exactly like any other perfectly ripe strawberry. But on the grocery store shelf, it would last twice as long as the regular strawberries you’re used to. It hasn’t been genetically modified, it…

Ian Allen “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong” In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party,…

In the days after the presidential election, Jessa Blades , an herbalist and makeup artist in Brooklyn who supported Hillary Clinton, was devastated. “All I could think to do was blend a tea to control my stress,” she said. Ms. Blades, 37, mixed three pounds of lemon balm, nettle, chamomile, rose…

We gaze into our crystal ball… (Image: The Universe in a Sphere ) Every December, we take a look back at big ideas from the past twelve months that promise to gain momentum in the new year. With more than eleven thousand projects launched between our Design and Tech categories in 2016, we have a…

The past year was almost certainly not the worst one ever, but 2016 does seem to have earned some sort of special designation. COURTESY YOUTUBE A meme is currently circulating on Twitter in which people post two contrasting photos: one is “me at the beginning of 2016”; the other is “me at the end of…

She'll pour for you; you'll pour your heart out to her. Confessions of a girl bartender at Lil's joint I was not the prettiest bartender at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. In my opinion, that would have been Caroline. I was partial to Caroline, though, because she had been so nice to me when I began working…

The only thing I know is how happy I am. Image: Peter After Donald Trump won the presidency more than a year ago, I, like many of my friends, vowed to cease paying attention to news for a while, fearing that the steady stream of depressing stories would be too much to bear. I figured my…

It was the middle of the night, and Elizabeth Gilbert was curled up in a ball of grief, confusion, and despair. “I found myself in a heap on the couch, around a pillow, huddled and shaking,” the author tells the crowd that has come to see her at Brooklyn’s BRIC House arts center on a recent Sunday.…

We all ask each other a lot of questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: “What are you reading?” It’s a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives. Here’s one example: I met, at a bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her…

Art is Advertising for What We Really Need At the centre of our societies is a hugely inventive force dedicated to nudging us towards a heightened appreciation of certain aspects of the world. With enormous skill, it throws into relief the very best sides of particular places and objects. It uses…

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty I know I grew up rich, but, let me tell you, nothing has ever been handed to me. Good ideas only come from a lot of hard work. That said, when it came to me that I should put climate change at the top of my list of things to start "caring" about so that my dad…

Walker at the Ford headquarters. “In the sixties, when you came to see the president,” he says, “it was meant to be intimidating.” Photograph by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination,…

Politics isn’t everything. This is obvious enough, but our confusing, embattled moment is so consumed with talk of politics, that it’s tempting to believe that life is hardly more than right vs. left. However, to recognize that the world is more than the sum of our interests and fears is perhaps to…

photographed in london for AGEIST by Kalpesh Lathigra tricia cusden, 68, london The story of how a semi-retired 65-year-old became a celebrated digital entrepreneur begins not in a startup incubator, or even the light-bulb moment that turned frustration into a winning business idea, but in a…

In the wake of global events like Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, it’s hard for a lot of people to feel happy right now. And according to psychology, we shouldn’t try to fight it. A growing body of research suggests that striving for happiness as an end in itself can be self-defeating . In fact,…

How you “think” it goes down…but it doesn’t | Photo Credit: Shutterstock “So this is just a formality for you guys, right?” The young couple stares slack-jawed at my friend sitting across the room. They adjust uneasily in their seats and look to one another trying to decipher what type of trick…

It was a surprisingly easy decision to make: No posting kid photos on social media. My wife and I made this decision not because, like everyone, we’ve been bored to death by endless baby photos from friends. Not because I’m worried about anyone’s safety (though as a writer I’ve had a few creepy…

It was nearly dark when our neighbor pulled into our driveway with a brace-yourself look in his eye. “He’s in rough shape,” he warned, as he got out of his pickup and walked back to open the trailer. “Rougher than I thought.” I took a look at the donkey huddled inside, then grabbed my phone to call…

To many, the 2016 campaign for the US presidency has been dispiriting and miserable, featuring the two most unpopular candidates in history. Thanks to the fascistic buffoonery of Donald Trump, it has been characterised by a tone that has swung wildly from facetious to obnoxious to disgraceful and…

Sean Rad knew Tinder had a problem when the bogus abuse reports started piling up. The wildly popular dating app has long allowed users to file reports against people who harass them or otherwise violate the app’s community guidelines. But as the company’s 30-year-old CEO would soon learn, some of…

Image via YouTube/Alliance for Climate Education One of the main fears an impending Trump presidency has spawned (alongside deportation threats and diminishing civil rights) is that the gradual environmental progress we’ve made as a country could be swept away practically overnight. Luckily, the…

The photo represents Hillary Clinton’s first appearance since her concession speech to Donald Trump.Photograph: Facebook An upstate New York woman, hoping to take her mind off of the US election results with a hike through the woods of Westchester County, bumped into another woman with a presumably…

The American vegan movement was always its own worst enemy. Members of the movement made their first impressions bellowing into bullhorns, desperate to make a difference by willing it with a loud enough voice. But actual engagement was a weakness as people tended to ignore the passionate subculture…

This post originally appeared on Wait But Why. Say hi to Lucy. WaitButWhy.com Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I…

Richard Burbridge Billy Bob Thornton is angry as hell. Here he is, a goddamn creative genius (have you seen season one of Fargo? And don't pretend you're not fired up for Bad Santa 2), but what he really wants to do is direct. He's fucking great at it (ever heard of a little thing called Sling…

Donald Trump’s head of strategy, Steve Bannon, backstage during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on 1 November.Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters For several years now, I’ve had a dark and fairly unusual hobby. When I’m alone and bored and the mood strikes me, I’ll open up my laptop and…

Leonard Cohen at home in Los Angeles in September, 2016. Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was…

The star of A United Kingdom talks frankly and openly about the importance of faith in life and work. A mma Asante’s A United Kingdom dramatises a historically significant love story between a white woman and a black man. She was Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), an English insurance clerk. He was…

Share this Share this... Facebook On the morning that news of Brexit broke, my husband woke me up at 6am saying: ‘They fucking did it.’ It seems somewhat melodramatic now, but I burst into tears and started anxiously scrolling through my phone, as if new information could prove him wrong. Across…

It is a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town in France. Two men meet at a cafe. One of them, Berenger, is half-drunk. He is being berated by his companion, Jean. All of the sudden, they hear a great noise. When they and other townspeople crane their necks to figure out what’s going on, they see a…

On this day four years ago, Barack Obama had just scored a comfortable electoral vote victory (332 to 206) over Mitt Romney. Reflecting on what felt like a slightly bonkers election cycle at the time, I put on my speculative hat as a futurist and penned a list of the 10 things that might get even…

By Vera Anderson/WireImage. Sorkin Girls, Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the…

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world. Source Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad,…

Valerie Aurora runs a San Francisco-based firm that holds training sessions on how to end workplace sexism. ‘It is the exact opposite of Lean In.’Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer I t’s a Friday afternoon at a tech startup in downtown San Francisco, and Valerie Aurora is arming men with…

Chelsea Beck “Apocalypse” seems like a bit much. I thought that last fall when Vanity Fair titled Nancy Jo Sales’s article on dating apps “ Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse ’” and I thought it again this month when Hinge, another dating app, advertised its relaunch with a site called…

Sherry Zheng was cleaning up from dinner, ready to toss out the remaining fried rice, when she grabbed her phone from the counter to text her husband, Chris. He was upstairs bathing their three children. “Should I save you the leftovers?” Her phone vibrated: “Sure.” Ms. Zheng, a 37-year-old…

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Michelle McNamara, a 46-year-old true-crime writer, died chasing a serial killer. The Golden State Killer , a name she coined while working on a book about him, raped and murdered dozens of victims in the 1970s and ’80s and remains at large. After years of investigative…

Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times By Why does David Letterman have a beard? To put it more precisely: Why did Mr. Letterman, after stepping down from CBS’s “Late Show” and a 33-year career in late-night television and all but disappearing from public life, spend the past year and a half…