Katy Waldman

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

On the evening of March 23rd, the Kennedy Center honored Conan O’Brien with the 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The ceremony, which attracted a mix of comedy stars and arts-adjacent members of D.C.’s beau monde, was the biggest event held by the center since February, when President Trump purged eighteen members of the nonpartisan board of directors and installed himself as chairman.

1 month ago | link.newyorker.com | Rachel Syme |Katy Waldman |Fintan O'Toole |Justin Chang

Plus: Steven Soderbergh’s spycraft in “Black Bag”; Jonathan Larson beyond “Rent”; and overheard at the Eavesdrop bar. View in browser | What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Katy Waldman

When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a cultlike biotech company. Their division was “Macrodata Refinement,” so they spent each day sorting numbers into folders based on what kind of creepy feeling the numbers emitted—a Graeberian “bullshit job” by way of Stephen King.

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Katy Waldman

NowCan reprogramming our genes make us young again? A breakthrough in longevity research may be nearing its first human trials. For those hoping to cure death, and they are legion, a 2016 experiment at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego has become liminal — the moment that changed …

Jan 8, 2025 | metafilter.com | Katy Waldman

Article by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker about an allegation of plagiarism in a romantasy series. Archive link. Unpublished novelist Lynne Freeman thinks that Tracy Wolff's Crave has used elements from Freeman's Blue Moon Rising, with involvement from her editor and publisher. Waldman discusses the difficulty of establishing plagiarism when the books are different in tone but have many similar details, particularly within a genre which uses tropes extensively. Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.