Guessing Game
The main thing to know about the N.F.L. draft is that no one really knows anything—but it’s the not-knowing that’s fun. An entire media class has emerged to predict where players will go and how they’ll fare, designing an imagined future for each team. Dan Greene on the football-fan-fiction world of the draftniks.
Onward and Upward with the Arts
Boots Riley, Marx Brother
The artist’s zany movies combine pop aesthetics with radical politics.
By Emily Nussbaum
What We’re Reading
A compact, elegant book that argues reasonableness is not the absence of convictions but the condition of living with others who don’t share ours; a surreal novel that riffs on the idea of drowned cities; and more.
The Financial Page
Where Are the Tariff Refunds for American Consumers?
The Trump Administration has started repaying more than a hundred and fifty billion dollars to companies that paid its import duties. So far, most of their customers are still waiting to see much benefit.
By John Cassidy
The Sporting Scene
The Fastball Has Never Been Faster
Pitchers like Jacob Misiorowski are throwing harder than ever, a result of modern baseball’s pitching development. But what does that kind of velocity do to the human arm?
By Louisa Thomas
Critic’s Notebook
The Generation That Will Always Be Too Young to Smoke
A new law in the U.K. bars young people from buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives. For the British government, even a sixty-year-old will someday be underage.
By Sam Kriss
Q. & A.
What the Gerrymandering Wars Mean for the Midterms—and 2028
Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ chief political analyst, on whether the Democrats can match the G.O.P. in the fight over redistricting.
By Isaac Chotiner
A Critic at Large
The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.
By Jill Lepore
The Weekend Essay
Can Art Teach?
Calling something “didactic” has become grounds for immediate dismissal. But do the merits of works with an educational bent—from “The Pitt” to “Elizabeth Costello”—suggest we should think again?
By David S. Wallace
In Case You Missed It
The night it began, he’d had an unremarkable meal of chicken and rice. Sure, the chicken was dry, flavorless, and the rice, wet, also flavorless, but he had not found the meal particularly bad, and, after imbibing a large glass of cold filtered water, he’d experienced no gastrointestinal bloat. He’d done little of note after the meal. He’d sat on his sofa and watched TV: innocuous cooking shows, the news, “Jeopardy!”Continue reading »
Daily Cartoon
“It’s so nice when the temperatures get up to where the President wishes his approval rating was.” Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein