LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—The British Ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, explained on Monday that he had tried to conceal insulting remarks from Donald Trump by writing his cables in English. “I believed that, by writing these messages in English, that would serve the same purpose as encryption,” Darroch said. “The fact that Trump […]
“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is […]
In 1944, in New York, a decade before Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs would publish their countercultural works, there was a killer in their midst. Lucien Carr was a brilliant Columbia University student from a prominent Midwestern family. He had introduced the three men to one another and was at the center […]
Hundreds of prospective voters arrived early to a Fourth of July house party in Indianola, Iowa, to see Kamala Harris. They lined the dirt driveway, a stretch of the sprawling lawn, and a half mile of the surrounding street with parked cars. In the backyard, Harris supporters formed a sweaty semicircle around the deck. (The […]
Some things feel so inevitable, so apropos of a particular moment, that when they happen one can only stand back and marvel at the on-the-nose-ness of it all. Or so it struck me in mid-June, when, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I came across a retweet of the very first, just-posted contribution to the platform […]
More than one hundred thousand people work as online content moderators, viewing and evaluating the most violent, disturbing, and exploitative content on social media. In a new book, “Behind the Screen,” Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at U.C.L.A., describes how this work shapes their professional and personal lives. Roberts, who conducted interviews […]
Ah, summer—full of barbecues, beach days, and ice-cold glasses of lemonade. But my favorite summer event is always the big parade, when the whole town comes out to celebrate the season’s arrival and I sit along Main Street, in my trusty chair, and cover the festivities for the Gazette. This year, I’m sad to report […]
Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor, and its confirmation all the more coveted for being so. In his fundamental study, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl detailed […]
This is the first story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from 2017 and 2018, here. It is not easy to live in this world. Everyone is constantly upset by the small things that go wrong: one is insulted by a friend; another is […]
Last Thursday, when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Rucho v. Common Cause, it legitimized one of the cornerstone elements of voter suppression in the United States. The Court ruled that the federal government could not impede partisan gerrymandering on the state level, even while conceding that gerrymandering might produce unjust outcomes. Aided by new software […]