Tad Friend

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

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

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…

In “Novitiate,” the writer-director takes an unexpectedly sensual look at convent life. 

The actress, who plays a fiercely protective mom in both “The Big Sick” and “Strange Weather,” remembers her start.

In “Chuck,” the actor portrays the boxer who inspired Sylvester Stallone to write “Rocky,” and discovers his boyish innocence.

It may seem unfair that billionaires get the first fruits of longevity research. But they’re subsidizing treatments that, if they succeed, will become widely available.

Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death optional?

Paolo Sorrentino’s new HBO series, starring Jude Law, is essentially a Cecil B. De Mille-style costume drama.

In “20th Century Women,” the director of “Beginners” reimagines his complex relationship with his mother.

Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?

Thirty-eight years later, “Genius”—which makes Perkins an action hero who wields his red pencil like a scimitar—has just opened, at last. The other morning, Berg, now sixty-six, stood in front of Perkins’s old town house, in Turtle Bay. The writer was garden-party-ready, in pressed khakis, a pink shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a striped magenta tie, with a blazer draped over his shoulders. In 1936, he said, Perkins’s wife painted the limestone exterior black, “and when people asked Max what t…

The actress, from ABC’s new drama “The Family,” sings her feelings about being a woman in Hollywood.

Cracking the over-fifty top ten in a young man’s sport.

Reynolds’s new film, “Mississippi Grind,” which opens next week, is much less pat. A meditative travelogue, written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, it follows two gamblers, Reynolds’s raffish Curtis and Ben Mendelsohn’s self-defeating Gerry, as they drive from Iowa to New Orleans, trying to win enough to enter a high-stakes poker game. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’ve made my share of conventional films,” Reynolds, who is thirty-eight, said. “So I kept saying to Ryan a…

The writer-director of “Sleeping with Other People” has made a movie about courtship in the age of Tinder.

Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like “jumbo” and “Grade A.” Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, f…

Black is now a stout and shaggy forty-five-year-old man, master of the overconfident slacker, rocker, and panda, but the chirps and burbles of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga, their lipstick-red coin slots, call to him still. “If I wasn’t an actor, I’d want to make games and toys—blowing people’s minds with fun!” he said. “I’m not technically skilled, so my game would be made out of cardboard and duct tape, and be a mishmosh of my favorite ideas, like the little mouse that jumps on the trampoline in Mapp…

The entertainment industry seeks the future in viral video. Tad Friend reports.