On Planes and Boats

A dispatch from the Art Editor

June 28, 2023

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

Queens of the Screen

For a decade starting in the early 1960s, a private Los Angeles society called the Gay Girls Riding Club made delirious, elaborate drag parodies of Hollywood films. 

June 25, 2023

The Land of Dust and Plastic

In Almería, the Moroccan and West African migrant workers who sustain the region’s booming agriculture industry find themselves either neglected or persecuted by the state. 

June 24, 2023

In Sorrow’s Kitchen

“Hurston exhibited a strong inclination toward the iconoclastic, but the shifts in her opinions and the elusiveness of her personality sometimes make it hard to see her for what she was, a black woman ahead of her historical moment.”

December 21, 1978 issue

The Blues

“The tremendous burden of sociology which LeRoi Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.”

February 6, 1964 issue

Ghost Story

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature. She has written a work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are.”

November 5, 1987 issue

The Haiku of Confinement

“Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: ‘Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.’”

June 25, 2020

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers

Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work.

September 20, 2019

Why Work Is More and More Debased

“New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.”

October 23, 2014 issue

The Golden Arm

“If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.”

October 24, 1985 issue

The Mindsnatchers

Misleading optical effects, half-waking dreams, sleep paralysis, tricks of memory, paranoid delusions, temporal lobe lesions, intoxication, fraud, and faddism are abundantly familiar to us, whereas the UFO thesis flouts the known laws of nature at every turn.

June 25, 1998 issue

A Close Encounter

So we arrive at Francis Crick’s directed panspermia hypothesis: a few billion years ago, a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization sent a rocket carrying a diversity of bacteria to Earth. The rocket discharged its cargo into the primeval soup, where the tiny creatures were fruitful and multiplied.

December 3, 1981 issue

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

Sharing the Universe

With the advent of radioastronomy, the scope of investigations of outer space has been enormously widened as the strange music of incredibly remote spheres keeps pouring into steerable dishes and saucers of all kinds and sizes.

February 1, 1963 issue

Who Swims with the Scientist?

“I learned how to duct-tape my feet and walk through blackwater swamps in sandals and shorts, a vastly helpful form of literary qualification.”

June 24, 2023

Subjects and Concords

“One of the intellectual quirks of professional historians might be that we find pretty much everything interesting and can appreciate why it would be exciting to study.”

June 17, 2023

Dancing Queen

“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.”

June 10, 2023