The MacArthur “Genius” on his forthcoming sci-fi epic, Monstro, and the evolution of his wily main character, Yunior. Image by Luis Blackaller courtesy of The American Library Association “We were on our way to the colmado for an errand, a beer for my tîo, when Rafa stood still and tilted his head,…

Quijada’s invented language has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise. Credit Photograph by Dan Winters / Typography By AJ Frackattack There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look,…

One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion…

Photo: Pej Behdarvand/New York Magazine In 1991, a waifish high-school dropout named Beck Hansen was tooling around penni­less in Los Angeles, bouncing between a video store in a strip mall, a garment factory in South Central, a movie theater, and a restaurant dish room. He also wrote and played…

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the…

Swimmers met John Fairfax and his 22-foot rowboat, the Britannia, in Hollywood, Fla., in 1969. Associated Press He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there. He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray…

Take some time to read through @robgiampietro’s thoughts about unbuilding and incompleteness. http://t.co/FQmQSALD

T he coolest, dorkiest, sexiest, and most indelible celebrity power couple of the ’90s reached the zenith of its “It”-ness on December 8, 1999, at a movie premiere held at the Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles. For Paul Thomas Anderson, it was the first public unveiling of Magnolia , his…

One of the most controversial political attack ads of the year didn’t originate with an actual candidate or political party. It came from Stephen Colbert. Or more accurately, “Stephen Colbert,” his satirical alter ego. The ad was funded by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, a super PAC…

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In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a…

The angels in “Wings of Desire” are not merely guardian angels, placed on Earth to look after human beings. They are witnesses, and they have been watching for a long time--since the beginning. Standing on a concrete river bank in Berlin, they recall that it took a long time before the primeval…

The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1. Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along…

Credit Illustration by Zohar Lazar Good morning. You have not slept well. Don’t open your eyes. Stick out your tongue. Search for the little sore above your upper lip. Pray that it healed in the night. No luck. Still there, rough to the tongue, and though it’s very small, not even the diameter of a…

The new film from the siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski, co-directed with Tom Tykwer, is an adaptation of the novel “Cloud Atlas.” Their model was “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a movie they first saw as children. Credit Photograph by Dan Winters On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup,…

Download “Radiolab: An Appreciation” Manifesto (PDF) Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick…

Photo: Art Streiber Conversations with Jack Dorsey frequently veer into obscure subject matter. Job interviews pivot into 30-minute disquisitions on the New York Yankees. Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square—which…

JIM BEHRLE @sportsytalk Tuesdays at 6 PM EST on @wfmu The Awl Be less stupid.

“The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,” Hanif Kureishi has a character say in The Buddha of Suburbia , “is reread him at thirty-eight.” If that was true, I wondered as I opened the first two volumes of the Library of America’s ongoing series of the complete novels, then what of Vonnegut at a…

Innovation is not a science. Much of it has the elusive qualities of art, dressed up as useful things. But business leaders continue to try and invest in innovation as if it were a science. And too often, the designers they employ as consultants engage with these leaders not only as if it were an…

Yellow Iris, Lemon Zest and Solar Power, some of Pantone's shades of yellow Courtesy Pantone. In an airy studio on a high floor of the London College of Fashion, featuring a long conference table, white walls, and a view to an adjoining patio—where, a sign warns, bees are being kept—the hues you…

Girls a television series on HBO created by Lena Dunham Mark Seliger/HBO Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath in Girls There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls , and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I’m going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that…

Today I received another catalog in the mail, the kind that can send almost anyone into a downward spiral of anxiety over the unbearable perfection of beautiful, imported, ancient, chipping, obnoxiously overpriced things. From the Brazilian handcrafted cowhide rug for $720 (Serena & Lily) to the…

Brent Cox Writer still living in Brooklyn, sorry Brooklyn! The Awl, The Toast, et al. The Awl Be less stupid.

Marclay spent three years assembling “The Clock,” a twenty-four-hour video collage. Credit Photograph by Nadav Kander When Christian Marclay moved from New York to London, in the summer of 2007, he left behind some of his most valued possessions: hundreds of boxes of thrift-store junk. Marclay, the…

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NewYorker: So far, not much about the official response to Ai Weiwei's "low-tech form of social networking" is surprising http://t.co/uHhk69oc @eosnos

At the AASA gathering at Yale, Chua made the connection between her upbringing and her adult dissatisfaction. “My parents didn’t sit around talking about politics and philosophy at the dinner table,” she told the students. Even after she had escaped from corporate law and made it onto a law faculty,…

longreads: Maya Lin on the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (@nybooks, 2000) http://t.co/jvAf268 #longreads

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “ Baka malamig doon ” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend,…