The C.D.C. was hit even harder. It has shed roughly a quarter of its workforce, including scores of people from the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which trains and deploys “disease detectives” to trace and respond to outbreaks and...
Jón Kalman published “Heaven and Hell” in Icelandic in 2007. The series’ other two volumes, “The Sorrow of Angels” and “The Heart of Man,” came out in 2009. English translations, by the redoubtable Philip Roughton (who also translated...
For the rest of the decade—the years represented by these Polaroids—she was booked and busy. “It was such a period of growth for me as a photographer,” Shur told me. “I really found myself, I’d say.” (She’s since...
This year, for the first time ever, the FIFA World Cup final featured an eleven-minute halftime hullabaloo, co-headlined by four megastar acts: Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber, and BTS. The lineup—theoretically a diverse parade of talent, with two of...
“The sun is hot,” Alan Jackson sings, accompanied by a trio of jaunty guitars (electric, acoustic, and pedal steel), and for a moment this sounds like a celebration. Instead, it turns out to be the beginning of a...
This voice-of-Google thing—a code I’d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality—slowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of “culture” to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per...
There are times when you can sense Nolan’s frustration—not with Homer so much as his own inability to reshape the material into something more than mere spectacle. When Odysseus and his men navigate a course between the stonelike,...
Labor-saving technology tends to create domestic systems that are far more efficient over all, but not necessarily easier for the people doing the labor. As the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote in “More Work for Mother: The Ironies...
Mary Kay had tried her hand at direct, door-to-door sales before. She was once enchanted with a Depression-era racket called the “Child Psychology Bookshelf”: badly printed, seldom-used encyclopedias filled with moral tales, sold on installment plans to poor...
On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died at Jonestown, the agricultural settlement they had founded in a remote part of northern Guyana. Many, in answering the call to “revolutionary suicide,” drank...
