Is Life a Game

www.newyorker.com

In “The Score,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that play is the meaning of life.You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human.Every summer for the past few years, I’ve taught a multiday…

Is the Dictionary Done For

www.newyorker.com

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture young persons by insisting that…

Lagos Is a Vortex of Energy

www.newyorker.com

In a recent book, “Èkó,” the photographer Ollie Babajide Tikare captures the messiness and hope of the Nigerian city.

Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives

www.theguardian.com

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

What Does “Capitalism” Really Mean, Anyway

www.newyorker.com

In a new global history, capitalism is an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.In September, 1639, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, recorded in his journal a dreadful tale of Puritan true crime. One Robert…

Does Society Have Too Many Rules

www.newyorker.com

When regular people seem burdened by bureaucracy, and the powerful act as they choose, it’s worth asking whether we’ve forgotten what makes rules effective.I live in a three-generation household. My wife and I, our son and daughter, and my in-laws…

The Futility of Simulating Nature

www.newyorker.com

In “The Anthropocene Illusion,” the photographer Zed Nelson captures how the natural world has been reproduced, reshuffled, and repackaged, sold to visitors in the form of spectacle.

The Semi-Fictional Book That Transformed the Culinary World

www.newyorker.com

“The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth” inspired culinary luminaries like Alice Waters and Samin Nosrat. Does it matter that it’s largely made up?It was early in 1985, during the first warm, blossoming weeks of spring in San Francisco, when I…

Was the Renaissance Real

www.newyorker.com

We celebrate the period as a golden age of cultural rebirth. But two new books argue that the Renaissance, as we imagine it, is little more than myth.With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the…

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review – streams of consciousness

the Guardian

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated.

Is This Mysterious Swedish Commune an Eden or a Nightmare?

THE COLONY, by Annika Norlin; translated by Alice E. Olsson Imagine you are an adult orphan, a rootless Hungarian man raised in Sweden, whose greatest emotional connection is with a charismatic criminal.

Before the internet, how the LA Public Library helped readers pick their next novel

NPR

Before the internet made book reviews widely accessible, where would curious minds go to find information about a new novel's subject matter or a plot? If you lived in the Los Angeles area, you could reference the Los Angeles Public Library's index of fiction book review cards.

Great Seamanship: Last Days of the Slocum Era

Yachting World

From childhood, Graham Cox had dreamed of the ocean. Growing up in Durban, he’d spent his time hanging out near what was then called the International Jetty, where far-ranging yachts of all nations berthed to break their epic passages.

The Paradox of Music Discovery, the Spotify Way

The Atlantic

A new book explores the company’s commitment to shaping what its users hear.

You Can’t Trust Elites. Just Ask a 500-Year-Old German Peasant.

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest social explosion in Europe before the French Revolution. As Lyndal Roper explains in “Summer of Fire and Blood,” her engrossing new history of the upheaval, “It all began with snails.”

The Bangles, One of the Biggest All-Female Bands, Want to Reclaim Their Legacy

The first time Susanna Hoffs and the Peterson sisters sang together and their voices blended, the frisson was unmistakable. “We knew we had something,” Hoffs said. “We created a band in that moment.” Hoffs, 66, beamed at the memory, sitting in her kitchen on a late January afternoon.

An Afternoon Lost at Sea Inspired Julia Felsenthal’s New Paintings

Vogue

One afternoon in July 2023, the painter and writer Julia Felsenthal, her husband, and their two dogs took their small motor boat into Pleasant Bay, off the coast of Cape Cod. A deep fog descended, and for four hours they puttered around in the eerie abyss.

What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives

The New Yorker

In 2012, when the anthropologist Carrie M. Lane would tell people that she was researching professional organizers, most pictured Sally Field as Norma Rae holding up a “Union” sign on a factory floor.

Extreme Skier Greg Hill Goes Deep on Risk and Adrenaline in His New Book

Outside Online

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