For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Cal Newport is filling in for Kyle Chayka.In 2013, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I Never Joined Facebook.” Social media had grown so ubiquitous that I felt obligated to justify...
At some point in the past decade or two, dance-music d.j.s discovered a way of punctuating their sets with a prank. Just as the music was reaching a crescendo, it would glitch, then cut out completely; videos playing...
Embers of the Hands, by Eleanor Barraclough (Norton). This lively history of the Viking Age—which lasted from roughly 750 to 1100 C.E.—moves beyond tales of seafaring warriors to capture everyday people: women, children, merchants, healers, walrus hunters. Given...
The last time I talked to Colman Domingo, in 2021, his life was completely different. At fifty-one, he was a successful character actor, the kind whose face you might recognize from a flashy supporting role on TV—say, a...
A hundred years after the opening of St. Pancras station, now the flashy London home of the Eurostar, a narrow strip of land opposite the train tracks near Regent’s Canal had fallen into disrepair. Once a polluted coal...
In cartoonist Barry Blitt’s portrayal of the upcoming Inauguration Day, the new President is sidelined into a dash of yellow hair and a sliver of red tie. “On January 20, 2025, the next leader of the United States—and...
Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of five books, including, most recently, “The Power Law,” an account of the venture-capital industry. A former Washington Post and Economist journalist, Mallaby...
James Hobson began publishing videos on YouTube in 2006, when he was still a high-school student in Ontario, Canada. His early uploads were crude by today’s standards—some gymnastics tricks, some parkour, and some mildly anarchic silliness (for example,...
A limousine is a kind of set; to enter one is to play a role, even without a camera present. “When people come into the car, everybody is dressed up, and you take on a new persona when...
I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long samurai sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from years of bodybuilding, his legs almost spindly by...
