Can Amazon’s Alexa be your friend—or something more? At Digg, Aaron Paul Calvin examines the recent spike in digital assistants.
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I’m Writing You from Tehran
A French-Iranian journalist writes a letter to her grandfather about the ten years she spent in Iran, trying to make sense of her identity and a country living very different public and private lives.
‘I Loved God, I Loved Believing’: An Interview with R.O. Kwon
Not only will I never get my faith back, but I’m going to keep missing it. I’ll always have that longing — but there’s no going back into the garden.
The Shelf Life of John Mackey
Whole Foods’ eccentric founder changed the way Americans consume food. Can he survive the Wall Street forces that now want to consume him?
How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King
The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.
Defeating the Celluloid Axis
The invisible language of film permeates Christian Kracht’s “The Dead,” prose that is neutral and shot through with so much darkness, you occasionally can’t find the light.
Karina Longworth on the Women Caught in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood Web of Gossip
Howard Hughes used gossip, spies and money to control Hollywood’s women for nearly 60 years. Karina Longworth critically examines the Golden Age’s gossip to stop his false narratives from becoming our history.
Chimayó
Esmé Weijun Wang discovers a new interpretation of faith while on two kindred pilgrimages: one to find an accurate medical diagnosis, one to a sacred site in New Mexico.
The New Feeling
When Eleanor takes a break from reading the news, her laptop goes missing. Full of self-abnegation, she asks Wallace Shawn for advice.
For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors
My Soviet husband said we’d need 24-hour day care for any children we might have. Many years and the fall of an empire later, I finally realized why he said it.
