I’d just sat down to dinner with my wife Saturday evening, in the big white-tiled back room of a restaurant on the Upper West Side, when the lights went out—not all at once but one fixture failing softly after the other, like a deck of cards being slowly shuffled. We diners glanced around in acknowledgement […]
Novak Djokovic came into the Wimbledon final against Roger Federer as the defending champion. He had won three of the past four Slams. He is the No. 1 player in the world. The distance in ranking points between him and the No. 2 player, Rafael Nadal, is around the distance between Nadal and the eighth-ranked […]
In 1963, Bob Dylan recorded “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a ballad about a wealthy white farmer who caused the death of a black barmaid in Baltimore and received a six-month sentence for his crime. In a profile of Dylan, published in 1999, Alex Ross describes the powerful way in which the song unravels […]
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 […]
On Friday morning, in Palermo, Sicily, security officers locked a young Eritrean man in a cell in the back of Italy’s most secure judicial facility. Known as the Bunker, the courtroom at Ucciardone prison was built in the nineteen-eighties to hold the largest Mafia trial in history: four hundred and seventy-five members of the Cosa […]
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. […]
If Trump Derangement Syndrome is real—and let’s see it for what it is: a justified madness at the Administration’s depraved disdain for the norms of democracy and, for that matter, of humanity—there’s also a countervailing artistic alternative, of fury focussed to a sharp point of dramatic precision, as seen in such movies as Spike Lee’s […]
The only surprise about the resignation of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is that it took so long—four days after the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York arrested the financier Jeffrey Epstein on federal charges of sex trafficking. The moment the Southern District unveiled its indictment, which alleged that “between 2002 through 2005, […]
Twenty-eight years after the first alleged instance of R. Kelly engaging in sexual contact with an underage girl, two federal indictments unsealed on Friday shed new light on how the musician allegedly got away with preying on minors while standing at the bright center of the music world, and how he escaped justice, in 2008, […]
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 […]