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Three teenage boys looking at their smartphone screens, April 2025 in St Jean d'Aulps, France

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids’ Mental Health?

Jonathan Haidt once heralded an “ultrasocial” world. Now he’s one of social media’s most prominent critics.

David Lynch at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2002

The Inimitable Weirdness of David Lynch

The filmmaker, who died this week, mixed the menacing with the everyday, the banal with the surreal and sublime.

When America’s Top Spies Were Academics and Librarians

Examining photographs of a Soviet spy trawler taken during a reconnaissance flight over the Atlantic, 1968

When America’s Top Spies Were Academics and Librarians

Books & the Arts

Illustration of author Alan Hollinghurst

Scott Bradfield

Alan Hollinghurst’s Elegy for Britain

At the heart of “Our Evenings” is the recognition that Britain had something beautiful once and threw it all away.

A collection of historical contraceptive devices.

The Battle for Birth Control Could Have Gone Differently

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?