Someday, when your commute or supermarket run gets interrupted by the collapse of society, there will be certain considerations to make. Jeff Smith seemed to know them all. Pacing under the sweeping metal roof of an open-air rodeo pavilion on the woodsy St. John’s County fairgrounds, Smith held the gaze of his sparse morning audience with a promise — that when catastrophe struck, his tips could get them home. Some two dozen people peered down from the bleachers at the 64-year-old Navy veteran in his “Everyday Prepper” polo. They scribbled copious notes.

A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?

The documentary, opening in 11 Texas cities including Austin, Dallas and Houston, includes interviews with several people who survived the crowd surge. The experiences of panicked concertgoers who couldn’t breathe and had no clear path to escape a massive crowd surge at last year’s deadly Astroworld music festival in Houston are featured in a documentary set for release Friday.

I doubt there has ever come a moment in my adult life when I could be sure my friends will drop everything and fly to my side if I were to find myself unceremoniously dumped on a weekday afternoon by someone I just started seeing a few weeks ago. In all probability, I wouldn’t do that for them either — at least, not in the middle of a work-day, and especially not if I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to engage.

The environment in which you grew up can have a long-lasting effect on your navigational skills, according to an analysis of data from nearly 400,000 players of a mobile game. People who spent their childhood in rural or suburban areas tended to be better at navigating in the game Sea Hero Quest than those who grew up in cities. This difference could be seen decades later, the researchers report in Nature, and was particularly striking in countries where cities are organised in a grid layout.

"Today they are trying to cancel a whole thousand-year culture - our people," Mr Putin says, adding: "They are banning Russian writers and books."

Julia Fox is singing the praises of her short-lived romance with Kanye West, two weeks after they announced the end of their relationship. The Uncut Gems star, 32, and West, 44, embarked on their relationship soon after meeting at a New Year's Eve party in Miami. They enjoyed dates in New York City, Los Angeles and Paris before the February 14 announcement that they had split.

Earlier today, a press release dropped on a Pentagon news service’s website titled, Why Today’s ‘Gen Z’ is at Risk for Boot Camp Injuries. It is very funny. You can read it here if you’d like (thanks Vice), but the gist is that a single dude from the US Army, a “clinical coordinator and chief of the medical readiness service line at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri,” has some concerns about the physical readiness of new recruits aged 18-25.

A valuable avant-garde painting of artist Anna Leporskaya's Three Figures painting, valued roughly at $1 million, was vandalized by a bored security guard who was on his first and obviously last day at work. The 90-year-old painting was on exhibit at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg and was on loan from Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery, Russia, as part of an exhibit titled "The World as Non-Objectivity: The Birth of a New Art."

A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology suggests that appealing to the moral elements of Buddhist teachings might encourage more people to donate blood. The researchers found that people with stronger Buddhist beliefs were more likely to say they would donate blood, and this was partly explained by increased moral attentiveness.

Shortly before his death in 2016, Alan Thicke, who played Jason Seaver, the dad on the long-running sitcom Growing Pains, told me how often people would come up to him to talk about how his work on the show had affected their lives.

The last few years of the pandemic have reminded us that humanity is far from invincible. We may be the most powerful beings on Earth, but just like every civilization in the past, we also have our limitations and weaknesses. Over the course of the last hundred years, industrialization, population growth, and technological development have changed the nature of human life almost beyond recognition.

In 1951, Werner Bischof was sent to cover the war in Korea. The photographer instead found himself captivated by Japan, where US soldiers took their leave, and spent a year exploring ‘the depths of the Japanese soul’

More than one-third of software programmers say they’ve used marijuana while working, with many finding that it helps promote creativity and get them into the “programming zone,” according to a new study.

Uruguay's state calendar makes no mention of Christmas or Holy Week, part of a secularization of its calendar which dates back to 1919.

Why have I come so far on a literary pilgrimage? I want to be unafraid to move in the world again. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” Bishop asks in her poem “Questions of Travel.” Am I, like her, dreaming my dream and having it too?

From The New Yorker’s archive: a selection of pieces about notable shows and how they have helped transform our culture.

Constructed using natural materials, Yemeni high-rises are superbly sustainable and perfectly suited to the hot and dry Arabian desert climate.

Thanks to nostalgia, the literary legacy of the USSR has a long afterlife.

The festival of the snake-catchers involves a procession carrying the statue of St. Dominic, draped with living snakes in Italy.