Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget: Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles […]
The New York Times Magazine
Inside Israel’s attempts to slow Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and whether it may ultimately take military action: Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on […]
The next phase of George Lucas’s career, the making (and studios’ rejection) of his new Tuskegee Airmen film Red Tails, and who’s really to blame for the “nuking the fridge” idea in the last Indiana Jones film: When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. ‘It’s […]
Judith Clark was a new mom when she was arrested, along with three other militants, for armed robbery and murder in 1981. She remains in prison—and her daughter Harriet has no memory of her mother any other way: The prison’s visiting center was her second living room. ‘When they got a new vending machine, it […]
In 1990, a trash bag with human remains was found in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The investigation soon expanded to killings in Albania and Belgium, and focused on the activity of a Yugoslavian former cab driver named Smajo Dzurlic: “Smajo Dzurlic, who is now 71, shuffled into the room, his wrists and ankles […]
The making of a comedian and his super PAC: In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to […]
If you survey informed Americans, you will hear Pakistanis described as duplicitous, paranoid, self-pitying and generally infuriating. In turn, Pakistanis describe us as fickle, arrogant, shortsighted and chronically unreliable. Neither country’s caricature of the other is entirely wrong, and it makes for a relationship that is less in need of diplomacy than couples therapy, which […]
The first report of a zolpidem awakening came from South Africa, in 1999. A patient named Louis Viljoen, who, three years before, was declared vegetative after he was hit by a truck, had taken to clawing at his mattress during the night. Thinking he was suffering from insomnia, his family doctor suggested zolpidem to help […]
Serpell told me that those handicaps can be easily masked by an outgoing, playful personality. “Bulldog breeders will insist that their dogs are happy and have a very good life,” Serpell said. “But a dog can love its owner and be happy at times, but that doesn’t mean his life isn’t needlessly compromised. In many […]
In Amwell Township, your opinion of fracking tends to correspond with how much money you’re making and with how close you live to the gas wells, chemical ponds, pipelines and compressor stations springing up in the area. Many of those who live nearby fear that a leak in the plastic liner of a chemical pond […]
