In Africa, there are two kinds of elephants: savanna and forest elephants. The species diverged somewhere between two and six million years ago, with the better-known savanna elephants spreading over the plains and open woodlands of Eastern, Southern, and Western Read More …
Is it perfect timing or merely perverse to release a documentary promoting the design philosophy “Less, but better” during the holiday season? The opening moments of Gary Hustwit’s “Rams,” about Dieter Rams, is more likely to have you revising your Read More …
Last year, on January 18th, I took a screenshot of an e-mail an editor had sent me about a story that I was writing on the traffic conditions in San Jose. I also retweeted a bot that had noted the Read More …
In 1973, Paul Allen was a twenty-year-old technologist who, like many aspiring entrepreneurs, had taken a leave of absence from university to pursue work as a programmer. Over plates of pizza one summer day in Vancouver, Washington, he posed a Read More …
One day back in August, I was driving home from a nearby state park, flipping through my usual sequence of radio stations—country, classic country, fuzzy-too-far-away-from-the-signal country, hip-hop, NPR—when I caught, at the opening chords, a song that almost made me Read More …
The title card for the new Toni Collette show not only identifies it as “Wanderlust” (Netflix) but also supplies a dictionary definition of the term. This signals the program’s efforts to elevate bluntness to a type of style. The six-hour Read More …
Long after most of my grandmother’s memories had faded, she would occasionally sit down at the piano bench, pull a yellowing score from a nearby shelf, and begin to play. Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” were simple favorites, but it was Read More …
Geometry has only ever confused me. Presented with the simplest ideas about space and shape, I get agitated and dim. But there is one concept that I think I understand: the asymptote. The asymptote is a line that a curve Read More …
The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay “Chance and Order,” which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as Read More …
Opening the thirty-fifth MTV Video Music Awards, on Monday night, the twenty-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes seemed close to rending his cut-off muscle tee, which was rapidly becoming soaked against his skin under a dramatic torrent of stage rain. But, Read More …