Alex Gibney

This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you’re supposed to feel okay about—she is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling medium—but who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.

The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy. (And this opinion is based on the 16 songs of the main album; earlier today, she surprise-released 15 more tracks on top of those.) She’s just processing a weird chapter of her life.

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Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute.

If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.

In the criminal case now unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump is accused of having a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, finding a way to pay her to keep quiet about it, and then disguising those payments as a business expense. The facts are all very tabloid-y. They also took place before the 2016 election, long before January 6 or the “Stop the Steal” movement, or any of the more serious threats to democracy we associate with Trump.

But the Stormy Daniels case has distinct and simple advantages: In the other, more sprawling cases that deal directly with election interference, Trump’s lawyers have been remarkably successful at piling on delay tactics and are unlikely to go to court any time soon. But in the Stormy Daniels trial, the defendant has been summoned, the jury is being selected, witnesses have been called. And the D.A., Alvin Bragg, has honed his argument that the hush-money payments were in fact an attempt to interfere with the election.

In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash—and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire—was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

The sight of Bill Boeing was a familiar one on the factory floor. His office was in the building next to the converted boatyard where workers lathed the wood, sewed the fabric wings, and fixed the control wires of the Boeing Model C airplane. there is no authority except facts. facts are obtained by accurate observation read a plaque affixed outside the door. And what could need closer observation than the process of his aircraft being built? One day in 1916, Boeing spotted an imperfectly cut wing rib, dropped it to the floor, and slowly stomped it to bits. “I, for one, will close up shop rather than send out work of this kind,” he declared.

When David Calhoun, the soon-to-be-lame-duck CEO of the company Boeing founded, made a rare appearance on the shop floor in Seattle one day this past January, circumstances were decidedly different. Firmly a member of the CEO class, schooled at the knee of General Electric’s Jack Welch, Calhoun had not strolled over from next door but flown some 2,300 miles from Boeing’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. And he was not there to observe slipshod work before it found its way into the air—it already had. A few weeks earlier, the door of a Boeing 737 had fallen out mid-flight. In the days following his visit, Calhoun’s office admitted that it still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong, because it didn’t know how the plane had been put together in the first place. The door’s restraining bolts had either been screwed in wrong, or not at all. Boeing couldn’t say, because, as it told astonished regulators, the company had “no records of the work being performed.”

Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High, but the mass-shooter era did. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. How could we know we were witnessing an origin story?

The legend of Columbine is fiction. There are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on April 20, 1999, and the story we all accepted back then. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly. A pair of outcast loners dubbed the “Trench Coat Mafia” targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Dwayne Fuselier, the supervisory special agent who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting H. L. Mencken in response to the mythmaking: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

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This winter, I attended a livestock auction on California’s remote northern coast. Ranchers sat on plywood bleachers warming their hands as the auctioneer mumble-chanted and handlers flushed cows into a viewing paddock one by one. Most of the cows were hale animals, careering in and cantering out. But one little brown cow moved tentatively, rheum slicking her left eye and a denim patch covering her right.

That night, I went to take a closer look at her along with a pair of animal-welfare investigators and some of the traders who had participated in the auction. Cow 13039, as her ear tag identified her, was segregated with other sick or injured cattle in a pen near the viewing paddock. A farmhand led her into a squeeze chute, so that I could see her udders and feel her bony sides and scratch her head.

A certain type of person will tell you that they read cookbooks like they do novels. This usually means they flip through them at night, in bed, perhaps with the help of some gentle, warm light and a hot cup of tea. They pore over the notes and instructions that precede each recipe; they dream up menus the way a fiction reader might picture the furniture inside a character’s home. They might flag dishes they want to cook, or they might not. The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.

Of course, there are some cookbooks that lend themselves particularly well to this exercise, and with the right title, any of us can fall into late-night reveries over bouillabaisse or dumplings. These are not quick-and-dirty weeknight cookbooks, nor are they written to bend to a trend, as with the keto and air-fryer manuals that seem to proliferate like weeds these days. For a cookbook to be a great read, it should be written with a living, breathing (and often busy) home cook in mind, and also elevate and expand the genre. The eight books below are titles you should, and will want to, read front to back. Each is written with care and enthusiasm, not just for the practice of cooking but for the experience of eating.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

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More than a decade after Tinder introduced the swipe, many Americans are sick of dating apps. As I explored in a recent article for The Atlantic, the cracks are starting to show in what looked to be the foundation of modern dating. Now young people are yearning for a version of dating they may have never experienced—and that may have never truly existed, my colleague Faith Hill wrote recently. I spoke with Faith this week about how dating has evolved, and what people misunderstand about the purpose of dating apps.