PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  Lucy Dacus is a formidable solo artist—since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock—but she’s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Although boygenius formed in 2018, and put out an eponymous EP that year, the release of its début full-length, “The Record,” in 2023, was a seismic event: it garnered seven Grammy nominations and three wins, and earned the band a slot on a Timothée Chalamet-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live,” a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and a Rolling Stone cover. “We had these big goals of playing sick shows. But it immediately outpaced our expectations. We just had to adjust. I’m still shocked,” Dacus said. Boygenius is currently inactive. It’s not easy to say no to more money, more attention. Yet the band had predetermined the time frame on the basis of self-preservation. “It was so much fun, and I think we ended at the perfect time,” she said...

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Democratic strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was 18-to-29-year-olds,” a polling expert and former adviser to Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign said. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.” Political strategists have opinions about what happened. The 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, a medium that happens to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. Many young men seemed to have bought the pitch...

 

 

  Bob Dylan’s career is particularly remarkable because of the way it has evolved, David Remnick writes: “with peaks, declivities, crags—all in service to the music he began to revere in Hibbing.”   A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan. He’s in his eighties. How does he keep it fresh?

So far, it’s a tossup which of the Trump Administration’s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President’s long-standing pet project: decimating free and fair elections. “It may be that we have become so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump’s false claims about rigged elections and corrupt election officials that we have become inured to them, but in the past seven weeks he has pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration,” Sue Halpern writes. “And, as with the rest of Trump’s calamitous agenda, he is doing it in full view of the American people.” The Administration and congressional Republicans “are only beginn...

  To be human is to talk about other humans. We all gossip, and those who don’t are either lying or dead. “It’s true that few people would be proud to be thought of as a gossip—the label is too definitive, too judgmental, singed with implications of sluttish secret-hawking and moral incontinence,” Alexandra Schwartz writes. “Yet, at the ring of the phone or the ping of the group chat, our hearts leap at the hope of some enticing morsel, delivered hot. Gossip entertains, and it also sustains.” Gossip is amusing, even salacious. The journalist and podcast host Kelsey McKinney wants to show that it is serious, too. In a new book, she argues that gossip is a fundamentally human behavior, and that it ultimately serves us well. In the service of truthtelling, the practice can act as a check on power, and as a source of solidarity and irreverence for those who lack it; it brings us together and makes us curious about other people. “But what of the gossiped-about? They can’t all be tyrants...

  Today, we find archeological remnants of earlier civilizations—tools, tablets, monuments—and use those to guess at what it was like to be them. In another couple of decades, we might use our genomes to store every pixel from every camera, every datum from every scientific observation, every record, statistic, or transaction. “There’s a sense in which the DNA in our bodies never forgets. Even though it mutates and recombines, we can still track its lineage back billions of years,” Matthew Hutson writes. “What would it mean for society if we harnessed DNA to store everything forever?” Read about the scientists who want to store our data using our genetic material.

 

  “People expect too much if they expect the courts to try to aggressively defend legislative prerogatives when Congress won’t do that.” A lawyer who worked in three Presidential Administrations talks about Trump’s defiance of court orders. Why “Constitutional Crisis” Fails to Capture Trump’s Attack on the Rule of Law.

  Gossip is amusing, even salacious. The journalist and podcast host Kelsey McKinney wants to show that it is serious, too. Is Gossip Good for Us? Kelsey McKinney, a podcast host and a champion of gossip, is out to change the practice’s bad reputation.

  Billions of years ago, evolution stumbled upon DNA as a storage medium. Could it hold the data humanity has produced, too?

  Somewhere along the line, the Democrats went from being perceived as the party of working-class people to the party of scolds and snobs. Andrew Marantz reports on how this perceived shift has affected the political loyalties of young people—especially young men. The Battle for the Bros. Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?