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A débutante, a burlesque dancer, and a poet, the shape-shifting Lang--who died at thirty-two--wrote some of the most aching, entrancing poetry of the twentieth century.

C'mon, I'm a dog. We sense these things. It's a tumor. I give the guy two weeks.

Readers respond to Kelefa Sanneh's piece about music criticism and Zach Helfand's essay about The New Yorker's fact-checking department.

Smoking a cig takes twenty minutes off your life. But thinking about Rudy Giuliani's downfall might add some time back.

How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love federal power.

The delights of fall.

Funny drawings from this week's magazine.

From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go--and what might we find?

"Here's a book / on neutrinos captured in Antarctica, / here's another on solar flares."

He was a spy, a crusader, an obsessive advocate for neglected people and places--yet his work was shaped, too, by an inner crisis.