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Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss
When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations...

Coming of Age in Panic Mode
The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his life. “White Out: The Secret Life...

Adam Friedland’s Comedy of Discomforts
When CBS announced the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” in July, a long-theorized concern came true: the late-night talk show was dead—for real this time!—its embalmed...

What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman.Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to...

How the Bonds Among Virtual-Reality Furries Saved a Life, in “The Reality of Hope”
Watch “The Reality of Hope.” Anyone who doubts the validity of relationships that take place only through a digital medium has never experienced one. But these days most of...

Why Hasn’t Medical Science Cured Chronic Headaches?
Two decades ago, I was leaving my morning clinic at the hospital where I work when I suddenly felt an excruciating pain in my head. It was as if...

Lorenzo Mattotti’s “Summer Rays”
For the cover of the August 18, 2025, issue, the artist Lorenzo Mattotti portrays the symphony of sight, sound, smell, and touch which comes to life when you walk...

The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.”...

Ethel Cain’s Anti-Pop Stardom
Midway through the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the camera cuts, for an instant, to...