We Are Hopelessly Hooked
Smartphone use has grown faster than any other consumer technology in history. But has our transformation into “device people” corroded our humanity?
The Shame of Wisconsin
Moore’s incisive review of the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer.
ISIS in Gaza
Sarah Helm investigates the roots of ISIS in Gaza and how Hamas is responding.
John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America
Drew Gilpin Faust on the work of John Hope Franklin, who would have turned 100 this year. “Only if we understand and acknowledge this past can we grapple with the conflicts of the present and the promise of the future. ‘To confront our past and see it for what it is.’ Franklin’s words. The past ‘is.’ Not the past was. The past lives on.”
Medical Research: The Dangers to the Human Subjects
Marcia Angell examines the history and ethics of clinical trials.
Urge
Oliver Sacks’s last essay for the New York Review of Books, which looks at a man with Klüver-Bucy syndrome, “which manifests itself as insatiable eating and sexual drive, sometimes combined with irritability and distractibility, all on a purely physiological basis.”
They Began a New Era
The late James Salter’s last piece for the New York Review of Books, on David McCullough’s Wright brothers biography.
ISIS and the Shia Revival in Iraq
Nicolas Pelham in Iraq, on the destruction of antiquities by ISIS, and the reality of life in Baghdad right now.
Mass Incarceration: The Silence of the Judges
A federal judge speaks out against mass incarceration.
Scientist, Spy, Genius: Who Was Bruno Pontecorvo?
Bruno Pontecorvo was one of the most promising nuclear physicists in the world; he also might have been a spy.