PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  Our culture editor Alex Barasch picks three of the best erotic thrillers after being inspired to study the genre by his recent Profile of the director of the new film, “Babygirl.” Pick 3: Alex Barasch on “Babygirl” and Some Classic Erotic Thrillers

  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?

  Scientists now know that birds’ brains can contain elephantine powers of recollection. Some birds can store, or cache, tens or even hundreds of thousands of morsels in trees, or in or on the ground. Why don’t our memories work the same way? The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds Some animals can remember where they’ve buried hundreds of thousands of seeds. Why can’t we remember where we’ve put our eyeglasses?

 

  Cheating, even in the abstract, touches a nerve like no other form of transgression. Why do people think they’re owed contrition from (alleged) celebrity philanderers?

  Even without the existential impetus of climate change during his Presidency, Jimmy Carter sensed how high the stakes were. The energy crisis, he told Americans early on, was a reminder that “ours is the best nation on earth.” Jimmy Carter, Green-Energy Visionary As President, he told us that we needed to shift to solar power. We should have

  By the time the Beverly Hills Hotel closed, in 1992, Irving V. Link had spent 42 years playing gin rummy and sun-bathing by the side of its pool. From the time he discovered the hotel, in 1950, Irving’s days had been well ordered and as predictable. At seven o’clock every morning, he would stroll over from his house, in the lower reaches of Beverly Hills; enter the hotel under to the main entrance; turn right in the lobby; and arrive at the Polo Lounge. Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth and ordered breakfast. Then, at around nine, he would stroll back through the lobby and follow the curving, carpeted stairs down to the lower hallway, where he would stop to say good morning to all the people in the downstairs shops, before walking through the glass door at the end of the hallway that led to the pool. There Irving passed time sunbathing, changing in his...

  Ina Garten became an American culinary icon by knowing what people want: ease, abundance, nostalgia, and butter. Her vision of comfort and plenty was, as her new memoir makes clear, a response to a difficult childhood. Ina Garten and the Age of Abundance The Contessa looks back at a career built on fantasies of comfort and plenty.

  In a 2003 essay about his time as a young writer, Gabriel García Márquez recounts his struggles amid early success. How Gabriel García Márquez Became a Writer From 2003: Gabriel García Márquez on his early struggles and eventual—and troubling—success.

  Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur,” written in the late 1920s and published in 1988, depicts a Communist utopia. But in our time, the novel no longer reads merely as an ambiguous testament to a vanished Soviet past, Benjamin Kunkel writes. How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur” depicts a Communist utopia, but Sta

  The lives and tastes of so-called old money—old, that is, in the American sense—are the subject of the photographer Buck Ellison’s staged tableaux and cheeky, deadpan still-lifes. Through these images, Ellison goads us to contemplate not just the existence of an American ruling class but the invisible lineaments of wealth, power, and race that undergird it. “It’s so clear to me that one of the main things that perpetuates inequality is our silence around it,” he says. newyorker.com What Old Money Looks like in America, and Who Pays for It Buck Ellison serves bluebloods up for public scrutiny as only one of their own could.

 

  In 1948, two Harvard professors surmised that a rare name had a negative psychological effect on its bearer. Were they right? Why Your Name Matters. .

  In Wisconsin, many of the Democratic Party’s candidates fared well in the 2024 election. Ten Assembly candidates flipped Republican seats after the state Supreme Court threw out a heavily gerrymandered map, and four Democratic state Senate candidates won Republican-held seats.   Though Kamala Harris lost her Presidential bid, the popular vote, and seven swing states to Donald Trump, the message—even in Wisconsin, which Harris lost—is not so straightforward. “I’m not setting fire to any playbooks around here,” Ryan Spaude, who flipped a Republican Assembly seat near Green Bay, told Peter Slevin. “We nudged this district to the left on a day when the whole country was moving to the right.” Slevin writes about the state’s down-ballot Democrats who won in the 2024 election and the hope for the Party in the New Year.

  “You have to give the producers of the Woodstock Music and Cash Fair this much credit: they are pulling off a great public-relations coup,” Ellen Willis wrote, in 1969.