The Argosy
A vessel for ideas · Carrying them across distance
The Argosy now reaches more than 500 readers a month. A short note from the Editor-in-Chief on who made that happen, and on what the paper carries next.
Ethan Yang·
On Sunday, Brazil votes again. The first round on October 4 sent Flávio Bolsonaro and President Lula da Silva to a runoff and embarrassed the pollsters on the way. An explainer on the two-round system, and on what a first round can tell you that a poll cannot.
Last weekend, a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, made in secret and released on fewer than 900 screens, sold out more than 2,000 showings and finished second at the box office. In a fall built on re-releases and sequels, it is the best evidence I have seen that a new text can still gather a crowd.
Warner Bros. — the century-old studio behind Batman, Harry Potter, and HBO — agreed to sell itself to Netflix, until a hostile all-cash counterbid ripped the deal away at the altar. The auction for Hollywood's crown jewels is the business story of the year, and its logic explains where all of entertainment is heading.
Hurricane Isaias knocked out power to more than 900,000 customers along the Gulf Coast, and within days the utilities were announcing that 95 percent were back on. That is a genuinely impressive number. It is also a number with a denominator, and the people who live in the last five percent deserve a closer look.
Medicare open enrollment began yesterday, and on January 1 the first government-negotiated price for semaglutide takes effect. It is a big discount on paper. What an older patient actually pays will depend on a plan they choose in the next seven weeks.
Every October, people line up and pay to be chased through dark hallways by strangers in masks. Researchers who carried their equipment into haunted houses found that the fun of fear depends on a surprisingly precise dose, and that the dose may be doing us some good.
Venezuela won the World Baseball Classic, Japan fell early, and Korea — after seventeen years of first-round heartbreak — finally escaped the group stage under captain Lee Jung-hoo. For my last regular sports column, a love letter to a quarterfinal exit that felt like a beginning.
Spain conquered the World Cup with ten-man Argentina defiant to the last. Sinner kept Wimbledon. A New Zealander stole the Open with a final-round 62. And a Korean golfer shot the lowest round in the history of major championship golf — men's or women's. The table convenes to sort a summer that refused to pace itself.
A week into the new term, The Argosy launches its Newspaper in Education program: free workbooks, built from our own articles, for elementary and middle school students. A note from the Editor-in-Chief.
On November 19, Korea sits the last suneung that lets students choose their subjects. The application numbers show what half a million people did with that choice, and why the government decided to take it away. A filing from one month out, with a comparison from across the Yellow Sea.
This week a quantum computer kept one logical qubit almost perfectly clean across a million operations, beating every published record by a wide margin, by the company's count. It's the right kind of quantum news, because it's about errors, not speed. It also comes with fine print worth reading slowly.
Universities now share revenue with their athletes, but the final legal frontier remains: formal employment, with contracts, unions, and everything that follows. Our two sports writers take opposite sides of the question that will define the next decade of college athletics.
The true crime genre has exploded into a multi-million dollar podcasting industry with a massive, dedicated following. But what is the psychological and social impact of turning real-life tragedies into popular entertainment? A media and psychology writer investigates.
For a few surreal weeks this fall, an AI video app turned a century of beloved characters into raw material for anyone's imagination — first, and asked permission later. The Sora episode is the clearest preview yet of the fight that will define the next decade of culture.
