PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  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?

 

  Vladimir Putin views his country’s cultural sphere like any other sector: a subordinate dominion, which should submit to the state’s needs and interests. What’s been lost?

  Ruth Marcus reports from inside an emergency hearing to discuss the Trump Administration’s defiance of a court order. “What ensued was one of the most extraordinary exchanges I’ve witnessed in years of covering the courts.” The Trump Administration Nears Open Defiance of the Courts In its conflict with a federal judge, the Justice Department claims to be complying with his orders while provoking a constitutional crisis.

  The last film by Sophie Fairy Fillières, who died before completing it, is a bold reckoning with an artist’s self-awareness and personal freedom in the face of illness. “This Life of Mine”: A Terminal Masterwork. The last film by Sophie Fillières, who died before completing it, is a bold reckoning with an artist’s self-awareness and personal freedom in the face of illness.

  On Tuesday, President Donald Trump demanded the judge’s impeachment, calling him “a Radical Left Lunatic.” At which point the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, weighed in. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote in a rare public statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

  Alex Ross writes about how watching two young pianists—Yunchan Lim and Seong-Jin Cho—play recently gave him “a tremor of hope about classical music’s eternally precarious future.” Two Young Pianists Test Their Limits. Yunchan Lim tackles Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and Seong-Jin Cho presents a Ravel marathon.

  “How are we meant to feel about shows that we both love and oppose?” Molly Ringwald wrote, in 2018. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?” What About “The Breakfast Club”? Revisiting the movies of my youth in the age of #MeToo.

  DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce is, in part, a classic Silicon Valley story: condemning the public sector while lauding the private sector. But it’s also about “how work ethic gets twisted to serve the ends of people in power,” Charlie Tyson writes.   The Long Nap of the Lazy Bureaucrat The stereotype of the unmotivated official, which has fuelled Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s assault on government workers, has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself.