Mattie Kahn

Jeni’s Ice Cream founder Jeni Britton Bauer is proud of the science behind her beloved brand. Melting points, precise flavor interactions, the exact number of scoops designed to be extracted from a pint—trust that she has scrutinized each element of the ice-cream-eating process. But when it comes to deciding on a new flavor for Jeni’s Ice Cream, science and spreadsheets take a backseat to, well, interpretive dance. Take the brand’s new Everything Bagel flavor—cream cheese ice cream mixed with a…

Roxane Gay is the kind of person people turn to for advice. She doles it out on Twitter to her 830K followers. She and the writer and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom cohost a podcast titled Hear to Slay—taglined “The Black feminist podcast of your dreams.” And she is the Work Friend columnist for the New York Times, where she addresses a broad mix of workplace dilemmas. A characteristic kernel of wisdom: When a woman who has been tasked with taking notes and organizing the calendar for her tea…

Cathy Park Hong and Chanel Miller on Making Art Out of Grief: A Conversation

Samin Nosrat, Phoebe Robinson, WNBA star Candace Parker, and 24 others share their hard-earned financial wisdom.

It might have been nothing more than some lurid gossip, had Becky Cooper—then a junior at Harvard—been able to leave it at that. When she first heard about the murder of Jane Britton, it was mentioned as a piece of institutional lore. Harvard is full of eerie and old secrets: underground societies, ancient, archaic rituals, and unsolved puzzles like that of Britton, who had been a graduate student at the time of her death in 1969. But Cooper couldn’t drop it. The more she learned about Britton,…

In June the public radio show and podcast On Being aired a conversation between its host Krista Tippett and writer Isabel Wilkerson. It made sense that Tippett had invited Wilkerson to come on the show, which has been a forum for intimate, sometimes anguished conversations about the human experience since 2003. Wilkerson had a new book, Caste, due out later in the summer. And its themes—the oppressiveness of racial hierarchies in America and around the world, the pernicious, lethal effects of di…

The PBS ‘NewsHour’ correspondent on covering Trump, writing her book, and rejecting “both sides” journalism.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, odds are good that Debra Messing will have tweeted. The actor—beloved for her role on the iconic sitcom Will and Grace, retweeted for her passionate calls to defend our fragile democratic institutions—has come to believe that her purpose as a public person who has breathed life into characters that people know and love is to use her platform for a cause. She has fans and an audience and a megaphone. The people she admires lack one. So she steps in as a…

“There’s a wisdom that comes from being in your 60s; you have a lucidity about life and what matters.”

Meghan Markle will soon participate in a rare interview—with a twist. This time, she’ll be the one asking the questions. On August 14, the Duchess of Sussex will close out a virtual summit from The 19th*—a new nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom focusing on gender and politics—with an interview with its cofounder and CEO Emily Ramshaw. The event will mark the centennial of women’s right to vote with a series of live-streamed conversations between prominent women in politics, civics, journalism, and…