How to Grant Your Child an Inner Life
From software that tracks children’s movements, to cars that only drive so far, American parents have many advanced ways to protect their children, but don’t kids deserve some privacy the way we did before the internet?
Private Mossad for Hire
Social media and poor governmental supervision have made American elections a target for a new aggressive breed of private Israeli intelligence firm, whose job is to manipulate reality.
Easy Targets
Most gun stores face no legal requirements to secure the weapons they sell. This sets them apart from other businesses that deal in dangerous products, such as pharmacies and explosives makers. Thieves have taken notice.
Tracking stolen firearms through the black market, from gun-store thefts to crime scenes.
A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions
A profile of a scam artist: Before Dan Mallory wrote a New York Times best-selling novel, he rose through the ranks of the publishing industry by creating a series of fabrications about his life and deceiving colleagues.
How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools
Journalist and documentarian — and Stuyvesant High School alumna — Laurie Gwen Shapiro profiles Alice de Rivera, whose 1969 case challenging Stuyvesant to open its enrollment to girls led to so many other male-only secondary schools and colleges to abandon gender-based exclusion.
The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives
Robert Caro describes how he started researching and reporting his multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson in an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing.
What it Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral
A personal essay in which Kristen Roupenian writes about the experience of having “Cat Person” — her fictional short story about a young woman who goes through with sex she’d rather not have at the end of a bad date, published in the New Yorker in 2017 — go viral, become the subject of much public debate in the #MeToo era, and be misinterpreted as memoir.
Missy Elliott’s “Supa Dupa Fly” Came From the Future
The second installment in The New Yorker‘s new interactive music series about individual works explores the way Elliott’s 1997 hit album reimagined hip-hop, R&B, videos, fashion, and black female identity, and why its futuristic vision continues to influence listeners.
The Day the Great Plains Burned
Ian Frazier, author of the classic book The Great Plains, takes a close look at the catastrophic fires that devastated huge swathes of Kansas and Oklahoma due, in part, to climate change.
Color Vision
Hilton Als’ 2010 profile of poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, who died this past Saturday at age 70.