Michele Moses

Gloria Steinem originally envisioned that boys would participate in a parallel event, Take Our Sons Home Day. Instead, now everyone’s invited to work.

Keegan-Michael Key discusses the experience of playing President Obama’s “anger translator,” at the 2016 New Yorker Festival.

A new video by Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin, the latest installment in our Obsessions series, takes another tack, placing this symbol of millennial narcissism in a larger cultural story. Will Storr, the author of “Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us,” traces selfie culture to the self-esteem movement. “This crazy idea came about in the late eighties and early nineties that, in order free ourselves of all these social problems, everything from drug abuse to domestic…

Robyn Gershon, a public-health professor at N.Y.U. who specializes in disaster preparedness, concedes that, in the age of global warming, it is not so outlandish to be thinking about the apocalypse. Per the “push-pulse theory of extinction”—a theory devised to explain the mass death of the dinosaurs—any strain on an ecosystem leaves the species in it far more vulnerable to cataclysm. Today, climate change and rising sea levels put us at greater risk of being wiped out by a disastrous event, such…

At a recent, sold-out show, Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye performed poems about divorce, long-distance relationships, and whale hearts.

Only, it turned out, this was not what happened. A team of specialists examined the polar bear and found that her coat (still white) was too clean to have weathered such a journey. It was possible that she had been captured as a cub and raised by nearby poachers, who, fearing a recent crackdown, released her to stay out of trouble. In any case, the wildlife experts have transferred her to a zoo, where she can be cared for and treated for the illnesses she contracted by eating garbage. This was n…

Unlike official emojis, the Emoji Mashup Bot’s hybrid expressions capture thornier feelings—ones that don’t have names.

“Nothing Fancy,” the new book by the food writer Alison Roman, makes the case that nobody should be too daunted by etiquette to have people over for a meal. “For anyone looking for tips on how to fold linen napkins or create floral arrangements, I am not your girl,” she writes. Instead, Roman teaches her readers to make “unfussy food”: homey meals that can be thrown together and snacks to hold you over when the throwing runs long. Roman gives cooks “permission to be imperfect.” It doesn’t matter…

“The Best of Everything,” Rona Jaffe’s best-seller from 1958, is what you would get if you took “Sex and the City” and set it inside “Mad Men” ’s universe. A novel about three young women who meet while working in the typing pool of a publishing house, it has the white-gloved, Scotch-swilling aesthetic of the fifties but also an unflinching frankness about women’s lives and desires—a combination that makes it feel radical, prescient. In order to write it, Jaffe interviewed fifty women about “the…

Beck set out to make something personal, to counterbalance the way that the pandemic is often portrayed in the news. “We keep up with numbers and stats and we are following graphs and stuff like that,” he said. “But what’s missing at the heart of all that is actual experience and people’s emotions and any kind of emotional processing of this thing.” His interview subjects speak freely and poignantly about their anxieties, their grief, and their utter uncertainty about the future. “I had a really…