Being wrong puts off neither prophets nor their followers. The term “cognitive dissonance,” coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the nineteen-fifties, described an imbalance between conviction and information. He had been studying a cult led by Dorothy Martin, a Chicago housewife who promised that, in December of 1954, an alien spaceship would arrive, followed … Read more
A few months ago, when Tom Brady was beginning his career as an N.F.L. commentator for Fox Sports, a commercial aired. It begins with Brady, his face all angles, sitting at a desk in a nondescript room, looking at videos on two big monitors in front of him, laptops to his right and left, and … Read more
The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also made their way through many other books—novels they had missed upon publication, long-out-of-print essay collections, classics that the passage of time had imbued with fresh meaning. Some of their … Read more
Tattered Cover is a Denver institution. Founded in 1971, it’s now one of the U.S.’s largest independent-bookstore businesses. Kathy Baum, who oversees the store’s orders for new books, curating what she thinks people might like to (or should) read, spoke with us not long ago about some of her recent and upcoming favorites. Getting her … Read more
In 1921, Charles E. Ives, a wealthy co-proprietor of the New York life-insurance firm Ives & Myrick, launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven. He sent copies of his Second Piano Sonata, titled “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” to hundreds of musicians, critics, and patrons across the United States. The first movement, “Emerson,” begins … Read more
The 2024 New Yorker Festival is nearly here. For the twenty-fifth year, leading artists, actors, writers, politicians, and thinkers will gather for a dynamic weekend of conversations, performances, and more in New York City, hosted by the magazine’s writers and editors. A small number of tickets remain to attend in person, and now there’s another … Read more
In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in … Read more
When people asked the poet Seamus Heaney what it was like to be living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the start of the Troubles, he tended to downplay the violence: “Things aren’t too bad in our part of the town.” But things were, in fact, quite bad. A kind of martial law obtained. British soldiers, … Read more
There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, … Read more
At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works in concert with a wearer’s AirPods to warn against slumping while sitting at a computer. So long … Read more
