Challenging those faux-profound bits of knowledge so often taken for granted Some great advice I once got was “Be less yourself.” This was in 2016, a couple of months after I left the Gawker website i

El golpe fue muy fuerte para el gobierno de Abdo Benítez porque el país no se encuentra en absoluto preparado para iniciar esta negociación, no ha habido un debate interno sobre el tema, no existe un

12 years ago, Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV-positive cancer patient, received a blood stem cell transplant. Brown, who was later dubbed the “Berlin patient,” emerged from surgery free of cancer — and, to

Illustration: The Project Twins/Synergy A friend of mine died recently – still only in his 30s. People keep telling me how sorry they are, and of course I’m sad. He was such a presence that I feel almost haunted by his absence. But it’s also more complicated than that. I met N at university, where…

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote a line I think about a lot. In her book Love’s Work, she says, “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” It is a very beautiful way of articulating a hideous truth: that we do not consent to be hurt or abandoned by those we love, and that the most…

I got my first MacBook in 2009. It was big and silver and one of the first things I did with it was spend an entire Tuesday afternoon in my dorm room trying to record a cover of Kanye West’s “Love Loc

A few weeks ago, I came across this Achewood comic strip via the No Context Achewood Twitter account, in which Ray (the cat in the chain and glasses) asks Roast Beef (the other cat) if he ever wants k

Three men cross an intersection, under the header “‘Chadestrians always have the right of way’ — Chad, Chád, & Chäd.” They are young, they are analyst-types, and they are all dressed in matching navy

Published inThe Awl · 7 min read· Feb 25, 2010 -- by Daniel D’Addario Matt Cherette is 25 and lives in Grand Haven, Michigan, about fifteen minutes from his parents’ house. He traveled to New York in

When I joined Postlight as an engineer last year, my first task was a big one: Rewrite the Readability Parser API. For those unfamiliar with the Readability Parser, it was the API that powered the pop

Since its founding by Elon Musk and others nearly two years ago, nonprofit research lab OpenAI has published dozens of research papers. One posted online Thursday is different: Its lead author is stil

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychol

The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz An

Very Intriguing Person is a series about people who fascinate us, for better or worse. One of the worst things about sex is that it involves more than one person. Unfortunately, this is also its chief

The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Bikini Maria Solange Ferrarini.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times On a sunny summer day in Montauk, Ipek Irgit was in the familiar situation of

In our new monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book, 1914 My micro-generation—that is, the

“Suddenly everyone in Paraguay is interested in birding,” says Tatiana Galluppi, a conservationist with NGO Guyra Paraguay. “Citizen science is booming, and guides are starting to get calls from inter

Shana Novak/Getty Images Mark was always one of the smartest kids in his class. He’s done well in his career, but when he checks Facebook, he sees people he outperformed at school who have now achieve

Nuestra lengua Una palabra es noticia: la #ComaAsesina Credit...Peter Arkle Las palabras son la principal herramienta de comunicación de cualquier periodista. En The New York Times en Español nos toma

Shotgun-toting guards patrol an anonymous warehouse on the outskirts of Ciudad del Este. Perched on the triple border where Paraguay meets Brazil and Argentina, the melting-pot city is often associate

“I really wouldn’t want just happiness,” the twenty-six-year-old rapper Mac Miller said, in an interview published on Thursday, the day before his death. “And I don’t want just sadness either.”Photogr

Eis-me aqui mais um dia, vendo as imagens que amigos e familiares compartilham no WhatsApp sobre a grande fraude que estão querendo esconder de você. Às vezes, antes de dormir, toco um vídeo em que al

Before this year, I would been satisfied drawing deep on the little straw of my feelings, voting for Cynthia Nixon, then forgetting about Andrew Cuomo for another four years. But today, when we are told our capacity for rational political thought is being overwhelmed by propaganda, social media…

Apple released a new flagship iPhone yesterday, the iPhone XS. This isn’t exactly ground-breaking news: it is exactly what the company has done for eleven years now (matching the 11-year run of non-iO

How to Write a Good College Application Essay An essay should explain why a student wants to attend a particular college and not others.Credit...Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Here are some tips

To talk about Rupi Kaur is to talk about numbers. Known for her unorthodox rise through social media, Kaur combines the intimacies of personal confession with the scrolling feeds of spectacle, yet her

“What ruins relationships and causes most fights is insecurity” — Olivia Wilde Source: wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock Insecurity is an inner feeling of being threatened and/or inadequate in some way. We’

Buckle up, folks, because we know a lot more about Antarctica than we did yesterday—and it is not good. According to several Antarctica-related studies all published today, a series of natural process

10 Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the righteous anger of Hole’s 1994 album, Live

Imagine a new, happier internet. Illustration: Pablo Delcan So far, the biggest perceived effect of the most important data-privacy law ever has been a sharp increase in emails from social networks an

The Expanse There are two great moments in the history of life that should always inform the science fiction of human space travel and settlement. One is when life made the huge leap from prokaryotic

Meet the Bajau Apr 21st 2018 THE Bajau, a people of the Malay Archipelago, spend almost all of their lives at sea. They live either on boats or in huts perched on stilts on shallow reefs, and they mig

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolf wrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded

For the past few months, a single advertisement has been relentlessly popping up in my Twitter feed. “Tired of the internet shouting factory?” it asks. “Welcome to Kialo.” The name is Esperanto for “r

“Oh God, that is so horrible,” grimaces Maye Musk, as though I had pointed out vermin in her son Kimbal’s impeccable new restaurant. All I had done was to ask for her views on the current fashion for

In an essay from early this year, artificial-intelligence designer Jacqueline Feldman wrote, “Refusing simple descriptions of the world — insisting on the world and not a micro-world — constitutes political resistance.” She was talking about AI’s ability (or not) to feel pain (or, really, how humans…

The rapper Kendrick Lamar’s historic milestone—becoming the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for music—figures in the grander, affected consecration of blackness within élite spaces.Photog

I got the new MacBook Pro (13″, fully maxed-out version) several months ago. My older MacBook Pro was (and is!) in good working order, but when I hired my brother last year he ended up using my ancien

Toni Morrison wrote, “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” In Spanish we say that when a child is born it is given the light. And that’s what it feels like to say the words, X⁠—. Like I’m being given a second chance at the light.

Two weeks ago, Facebook learned that The New York Times, Guardian, and Observer were working on blockbuster stories based on interviews with a man named Christopher Wylie. The core of the tale was fam