LUIGI MANGIONE, CURRENTLY the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected.
The first couple minutes of Quincy—the 2018 documentary about Quincy Jones, co-directed by his daughter Rashida—are really a quite striking prologue. The shots are simple enough: There’s the obligatory survey of so many record plaques and iconic portraits posted on so many walls of Quincy’s mansion in Bel-Air.
For most of advertising history, “red” or “blue” as partisan loyalty signaled more your taste for Coke or Pepsi than your identity as Republican or Democrat. Mass markets, by definition, necessitated selling to both sides of the aisle.
When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.
I spent the daytime during the summer of 2009 at an unpaid internship at a literary magazine, and I spent the nighttime, paid, behind the counter of the gelato stand at the Times Square location of Madame Tussauds wax museum.
During a reading project I undertook to better understand the “third wave of democracy” — the remarkable and rapid rise of democracies in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa in the 1970s and 80s — I came to realize that this ascendency of democratic polities was not the result of some force propelling history toward its natural, final state, as some scholars have argued.
