The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime pursuits on its lake and as a ski resort in winter. There are hiking...
Few words in the English language have the onomatopoeic satisfaction of “slop.” Its opening consonants evoke sludge and slipperiness, the round “O” and smacking “P” the liquid wallop of a viscous substance hitting a surface at speed. Pigs...
Dijon Duenas has one of those voices that’s meant for televised singing competitions and gospel choirs, swooning ballads and achy slow jams. It preens and jilts, wails and whimpers, often stretching and straining into strange, improbable territory. It’s...
It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s Spike Lee’s turn, and in his new drama, “Highest 2...
Because the Russian alphabet has no direct equivalent of the letter “H,” speakers often substitute a “G” sound; “Harry Potter” thus becomes “Garry Potter.” We’re reminded of this funny detail early and often in “My Undesirable Friends: Part...
When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations of his career was loss. Being a scholar of...
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman.Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at OpenAI...
Two decades ago, I was leaving my morning clinic at the hospital where I work when I suddenly felt an excruciating pain in my head. It was as if my skull were exploding while simultaneously being gripped in...
Midway through the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the camera cuts, for an instant, to two children sitting in front of a television, watching...
