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
“There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet.” With that sentence, written by the journalist Samantha Cole for the tech site Motherboard in December, 2017, a queasy new chapter in our cultural history opened. A programmer calling himself “deepfakes” told Cole that he’d used artificial intelligence to insert Gadot’s … Read more
Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism (and of the New Deal) and, eventually, to the Second World War; for 1945, when the United States emerged from that war uniquely … Read more
One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, … Read more
St. James’s Square, like many others in London, appears with little forewarning or fanfare. You leave the expensive ruckus of Piccadilly, cut down a narrow side street, and there it suddenly is: a holiday from the city, with a public garden islanded in its center. One gentle corner is home to the London Library, founded … Read more
Ryan O’Neal made his name as a clean-cut, swoon-worthy leading man in films such as the tragic Love Story, Stanley Kubrick’s historical drama Barry Lyndon, and the madcap What’s Up Doc, but earned perhaps his most enduring acclaim for the father-daughter act in 1973’s Paper Moon, in which he verbally sparred with his real-life, 8-year-old … Read more
