Our Picks

The vice president looks back — and forward. Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter’s exit interview with Joe Biden.

“Humans have taken the reins from the gods, and luck has become a design tool capable of changing players’ experiences and expectations.” A look at how game developers strike a balance between luck and fairness.

The lessons we are drawing from her work may not be the one we most need to learn.

A raw, honesty essay on coming to terms with gender identity and trying to navigate existence in a culture fraught with issues around gender and sexuality. “I’m still not sure whether I’ll ever be ready to gain male privilege, to part with cis privilege.”

Billy Barr moved into a remote part of the Rocky Mountains in search of solitude over 40 years ago. To avoid boredom, he documented snow levels, animal sightings, and the date flowers first bloomed. “…collectively his work has become some of the most significant indication that climate change is rearranging mountain ecosystems more dramatically and quickly than anyone imagined.”

In 1996, David Foster Wallace profiled tennis player Michael Joyce in one of the most celebrated pieces of sports writing ever published. Who has he become since?

“It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast. “Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again. Lying about telling the truth is part of the joke.”

Baker Allison Robicelli on the difficulty of offering insurance (or being insured) in the service industry, and how the Affordable Care Act started to change things — and saved her and her husband’s lives.

“The Martin Luther King Jr. that we celebrate every year is no longer a man or a movement. The annual holiday is no longer a remembrance.”

A profile of Barack Obama as a reader, which includes a link to Kakutani’s 3,015-word interview with the outgoing president. He  discusses his love for reading, some authors he loves–plus short stories he’s written.