Jody Rosen

A U.F.O.-like dome with sci-fi origins has become a mecca for spiritual seekers looking to zone out on its sound baths. One curious writer travels to the Mojave Desert to see what all the noise is about.

Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.

For the first installment of his new column, T’s critic at large Jody Rosen considers the cultural history of the gadget everyone’s talking about.

Ordos, like so many of the country’s hundreds of new towns, is famous for being empty — a symbol, some would say, of the hubris of rampant urbanization. But the few people who live there see it differently.

Memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets might be the most difficult test in the world. As technology imperils this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?

In the vertiginous mountains of Bhutan, where happiness is akin to holiness, bicycling has become much more than a national pastime. It’s a spiritual journey.

The trade in illegal wildlife is a $19 billion annual business with ties to the Russian mob and Islamic extremists, and there’s one place the world turns to investigate the crime: a federal forensics lab (and curiosity cabinet) in a hippie town in Oregon.

A few years ago, Beyoncé Knowles was like any other record-breaking pop star in an already crowded field. Then something changed.

They’re as old as humankind and used by practically every person on the planet every day, so how come they’re so underappreciated?

The latest in a series of musings, observations and procrastinations of T’s critic at large Jody Rosen.

In life, the two may have been miles apart in circumstance and success. But as each other’s great influences, they’ll be forever one.

It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

Professional sports are returning — to empty stadiums where you can hear birds sing. The game is the same. Watching it isn’t.

If anyone understands the power of video, it is the N.F.L. But in a triumph of guerrilla filmmaking, Kaepernick keeps seizing their narrative control.

He’s a staggering musical prodigy — with strangely mundane songs.

Just buy it, he seems to suggest; what are you, a wimp?

Meet music’s new outlaw: the online scammer.

As he approaches 90, even brushes with death can’t keep him off the road — or dim a late-life creative burst.

Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment.

Months of preparation, hundreds of workers, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment.