The New Yorker

“More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past century than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.”

“Come to think of it, it was possible, even probable, that the boat had already gone over the Falls or hit the Snag.”

“In the darkness, everyone donned face masks and headlamps. Of the five activists who had volunteered to occupy the tunnel, only Dan Hooper, a veteran protester from Wales known as Swampy, had experience below ground.”

“Mina’s final interview at the U.S. Embassy was scheduled for August 31, 2021, and she hoped that, when Joe Biden took office, he would delay the withdrawal to insure Afghans like her a safe way out of the country. Instead, he set a withdrawal deadline of September 11th. ‘Biden was every Afghan’s hope,’ Faqeer wrote to me. ‘I am sure all Afghan American citizens voted for him, but he did worse than Trump. I am sorry to say this :(.'”

“Part of the appeal of a young woman crossword constructor is that she is focussing her intelligence on a frivolity; she is making her smarts unthreatening and benign. Of course, nothing about my story, neither its reflection of cultural misogyny nor its origins in my willful self-destruction, is benign. Surely this is not what the mothers who approached me at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament had in mind when they tried to set me up with their doctor or lawyer sons.”

“These days, we don’t just write, revise, and lay out our work in one program; if so inclined, we can go all the way from gathering research to monitoring reception without leaving our browsers. Some thrive on the streaming of a previously sequential process; for others, it’s like being forced to write with an Instant Pot. Could the new wave of Zen editors and e-ink tablets, tempering tech solutionism with analog nostalgia, reverse this trajectory—and give writers a dedicated device of our own?”

When I told Strong that I, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, he looked at me with incomprehension and asked, “In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?” No, I said, in the sense that it’s funny. “That’s exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role,” McKay told me. “Because he’s not playing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like he’s Hamlet.”

“A growing group of laborers is trailing hurricanes and wildfires the way farmworkers follow crops, contracting for big disaster-recovery firms, and facing exploitation, injury, and death.”

“Genetic genealogists like CeCe Moore are cracking cold cases and transforming policing. As DNA analysis redefines ancestry and anonymity, what knowledge should we be permitted to unlock?”