John Paul Stevens, who served on the Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010 and died Tuesday, at the age of ninety-nine, belonged to a vanished tradition on the Supreme Court and in American life: moderate Republicanism. By the time he left the Court, during the tenure of John Roberts as Chief Justice, Stevens was the […]
In 1987, Pico Iyer decided to relocate to Japan. Born in the U.K. to Indian parents, in 1957, Iyer was already a successful writer, living in New York and working as a correspondent for Time, but he had long been drawn to Japanese culture, and he relished the idea of a year of quiet and […]
Though David Crosby’s recording career began in the early nineteen-sixties, as a founding member of the folk-rock band the Byrds, the singer and guitarist has been enjoying a curious renaissance in recent years. “Remember My Name,” a new documentary about Crosby—directed by A. J. Eaton and co-produced by Cameron Crowe, who conducts many of the film’s […]
On Sunday afternoon, the Guatemalan government issued a statement cancelling a highly anticipated meeting, scheduled for Monday, in Washington, between Jimmy Morales, the President of Guatemala, and Donald Trump. The subject of the meeting was a deal between the two countries that would allow the U.S. government to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala under […]
It’s useful, always, to consult the stylebook. Earlier this year, the Associated Press belatedly revised its entry on race, which now reads, “Do not use racially charged or similar terms as euphemisms for racist or racism when the latter terms are truly applicable.” The recommendation is a concession to clarity, not to passion or politics. […]
On Sunday night I texted my twin brother, Chris, who lives in San Francisco, and asked him to excavate his memory about the bullying we’d experienced for being Asian while growing up. Our family moved around several times during our childhood: we spent elementary school in a Pittsburgh suburb; middle school was in upstate New […]
Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don’t hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don’t have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified “punctuation theorist” who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: “Semicolon: The Past, Present, […]
On a sunny afternoon in mid-June, several hundred students and lecturers from the Lebanese University, in Beirut, gathered in a square outside the Prime Minister’s office. Some stood on top of a pickup truck loaded with loudspeakers, leading chants against proposed government budget cuts to the university. “We want to continue our year and we […]
In the summer of 2002, before the U.S. Open, Pete Sampras, slowing and struggling and contemplating retirement, at age thirty-one, brought back his old coach Paul Annacone. Then Sampras, who was seeded seventeenth, went on to win the tournament, defeating Andre Agassi in the final, stunning much of the tennis world. He retired shortly thereafter. […]
PALM BEACH, Florida (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump was reportedly “hopping mad” on Saturday after a surprise ICE raid left his Mar-a-Lago retreat with no employees. The ICE agents conducting the pre-dawn raid swept through the opulent Palm Beach club and left guests with no one to prepare their food, wash their dishes, or clean their […]