“Alice Gregory on Finding a Uniform”

“When the weather permits — and it does in New York from September to May — I wear a black cotton turtleneck, skinny blue jeans that (crucially) are not tight and a pair of black boots. My hair, I have decided, is my main accessory. If it’s cold and dry, I wear a…

“I asked my student why he voted for Trump. The answer was thoughtful, smart, and terrifying.”

“Peter knows where he stands. He remembers multiple factories and small businesses “shutting down or laying off. Next thing you know, half of downtown” in the bigger…

“How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained”

“The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms — Sardinia, Rome…

“The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”

“The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it…

“How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”

“Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies…

Using large teams of…

“‘Let me reverse your threat’: how ‘bullying’ Roald Dahl was fired by his publisher”

“Gottlieb was Jewish, and Dahl was openly anti-semitic. The British author didn’t respect his editor, and undermined his knowledge of modern art. He was belligerent to him, and his…

“Unusual Normality”

“Ishmael Beah comes to New York as a teenager after years of fighting as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and gets a second chance at childhood.”

“Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Psychological Paradox of the Sulk”

“Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our…