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Intros and Manifestos

From the Magazine

No Time to Die
Finding yourself sliding down the lower leg of the K-shaped economy? You’re not alone in facing the downturn: sunny prospects are saved for those with assets to inflate and the dwindling number of flesh-and-blood employees of the Magnificent Seven. Those tech companies’ AI ...

A Million Parts per Million
Pour one out for the Chinese paddlefish, its habitat destroyed by dams on the Yangtze; the cryptic treehunter, the bird’s range in the Brazilian forest cleared for sugarcane plantations; or the gastric-brooding frog, one of over a hundred native species of plants and animals ...

Screen Sick
The history of literacy is a list of complaints. Critics reliably decry each new technological development as an attention-stealing toy. Before recent grousing about ChatGPT, protestations were uttered about the detrimental effects of the internet (fearing endless distraction, ...

Guy vs. Guy
Gauche, in my opinion, to settle a grudge worthy of the name with money. (Did you not nurse that grievance? Would you sell your child?) But when the payoff grows big enough, cooler heads prevail, or just ones more venal. From Sam Altman to Ted Cruz, political, corporate, and ...

Own Goals
“America first does not mean America alone,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on April 23, seeking to reassure the market three weeks after the president declared Liberation Day and tariffed the world. Spooked by turbulence in the bond market—or eager to discard the ...

Been There, Done That
Forty-Five has become 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our ...

At Home He’s a Tourist
On the morning of November 5, the day of the 2024 presidential election, the algorithm delivered me the promise of escape. Titled “Here’s How to Buy Citizenship in Another Country,” the article lamented the global character of climate change and the fact that “political ...

On the Clock
Choose your precipice. The grist that makes modern life will run out at some point—when will we tap the last barrel of crude, blow through the remaining stocks of helium, deplete those rare metals only getting rarer? More pressing than bismuth and boron as I write this in ...

Just Say Yes
You can trace the liberalizing contours of the American public’s relationship to drugs by way of the last few presidents’ consumption habits. Clinton famously didn’t inhale, only willing to admit to touching reefer in England. Before his religious reawakening at forty, ...

Nohow On
Failure abounds today, but also its recuperation. Who hasn’t been sold “resilience,” what with a vast industry of self-help hucksters and combination fitness-business influencers imploring you to grit your teeth and embrace the grind? Samuel Beckett’s call to fail again ...

Age of Onset
We’ve never been so old. There were 95,000 centenarians in 1990 and more than 450,000 in 2015, according to estimates from the United Nations. Global life expectancy doubled from 1920 to 2020; the pandemic saw a dip that was horrifying but comparatively minor in the scope of a ...