Tad Friend

Not so long ago, that analogizing was the work of shamans, imams, and ministers. Nowadays, it falls to muscular men in black jeans who prowl the stage: the motivational speakers. They know that each of us has a dream life, one that seems as distant as childhood happiness. They make getting to it a matter of discrete steps—believe in your greatness; envision where you want to be in a year; find the window in every wall—and urge you to start taking them. “Own your future—because if you don’t, some…

A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.

A door-to-door salesman’s quest to rebrand his profession.

A relationship reconsidered by reading between the lines.

Studies suggest that it takes at least a decade to achieve real expertise. The company promises transformation in a few hours.

Eating meat creates huge environmental costs. Impossible Foods thinks it has a solution.

With “Barry,” his bleakly funny TV show, Hollywood’s favorite impressionist reinvents himself as a writer-director.

It was four days before the “jungle primary,” a multiparty free-for-all that would advance two gubernatorial candidates from a field of twenty-seven to the general election, in November. Newsom, the state’s lieutenant governor, was far ahead in the polls, and, if his position held, he would come into office with a budget surplus of nearly nine billion dollars. But, like many Democratic politicians in the Donald Trump era, he was trying to harness not only the alarm of moderates and the rage of p…

Many people in tech point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I., has grown ever safer and more reliable—certainly safer and more reliable than we are. (Self-driving cars and trucks might save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.) For them, the question is whether the risks of creating an omnicompetent Jeeves would exceed the combined risks of the myriad nightmares—pandemics, asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, etc.—that an A.G.I. could sweep aside for us. The assessments rem…

Glover is the thirty-four-year-old creator, head writer, occasional director, and star of “Atlanta,” the black comedy about black life—three men and a woman going nowhere much, and beginning to realize it—that in its first season won two Golden Globes, two Emmys, and nearly universal admiration. Chris Rock told me, “ ‘Atlanta’ is the best show on TV, period.” In this episode, from the second season (which débuts this Thursday, on FX), Glover and Beetz’s characters, Earnest (Earn) Marks and Vanes…