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Pathway cartoons and comics

Unleash your creativity with CartoonStock's collection of pathway cartoons! Whether you need a humorous illustration for a hiking guide, a motivational image for a career path article, or a playful visual for a personal development blog, we've got the perfect cartoon to pave your way. Choose from our wide selection of pathway cartoons and let the journey begin!

Pathway Cartoon #1

Farmer Joe's soybean maze never caught on

Pathway Cartoon #2

The inherent problem with taking the path of least resistance...

Pathway cartoon #3.

'The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying People'

Pathway cartoon #4.

'The Seven Habits of Highly Strung People.'

Pathway cartoon #5.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Pathway cartoon #6.

Wife taking a photo of her husband and their shoveled walk-way

Pathway cartoon #7.

"There has to be a better way to remember the way back."

Pathway cartoon #8.

"Let's start you off with the clowns, and then maybe you can work your way up to trapeze."

Pathway cartoon #9.

"Let's give the left a try today."

Pathway cartoon #10.

Pathway to adaptation

Pathway cartoon #11.

"We made good time. We're already in the valley of the shadow of death."

Pathway cartoon #12.

"I had a yard sale and somebody brought it."

Pathway cartoon #13.

"When euphemism time comes which would you prefer - 'passed away' or should I just say that he boxed?"

Pathway cartoon #14.

"Here comes one of life's little luxuries! Assisted dying."

Pathway cartoon #15.

Pathway Cartoon #16

A man stranded in the desert watches a king crawl by on a red carpet

Pathway cartoon #17.

The road less traveled.

Pathway cartoon #18.

"And this is where he'll be during the day - we call it The Men's Downhill."

Pathway cartoon #19.

Tourist Crossroad

Pathway cartoon #20.

'Have you shoveled the snow off the walkway?'

Pathway cartoon #21.

People directed down the right way.

Pathway cartoon #22.

"So there you are—I thought I heard someone squishing moodily about the moors."

Pathway cartoon #23.

Unusual Staircase

Pathway cartoon #24.

Fame without riches... Riches without fame.

Pathway cartoon #25.

Man sweating profusely while shoveling snow in his boxer shorts

Use the following code at checkout:

ONEBUCKCHUCKLES

Coupon will be applied to your cart. Offer is limited to one cartoon per customer and does not include web and publication licenses. Some collections/images may be excluded from this offer.

Today's Google Doodle combines art and science to get in on the total solar eclipse frenzy

The day when the moon blocks the sun’s rays for a few minutes ( weather and location permitting ),, has arrived, and search engine giant Google honored the total solar eclipse with its doodle drawing Monday.

Featured on the front page of google.com , users can enjoy a drawing that was created by Google Doodler Alyssa Winans. Depicting the total eclipse through the letters of Google, fans can enjoy the two subjects that often do not meet: art and science.

With solar eclipse glasses on for safety, Winans’ drawing represents each type of eclipse watcher. From the fully engaged in their lawn chairs to the person who missed the celestial event because they fell asleep, you may find yourself in one of the doodle’s letters. Like the Google solar eclipse animation that launched last week, the doodle changes from light to darkness as the letters embrace the rare phenomena.

Here is what the Google Doodle looks like:

Google Doodle in 2017

For the solar eclipse that happened in August 2017, Google created an animated doodle that shows two space aliens playing volleyball with the moon. Rotating in circles through the air, the moon partially covers the sun. Google’s logo is covered in stars and is visible in the sky above the two space creatures.

The total solar eclipse is Monday: Here's everything to know, including time, path, safety

Google solar eclipse animation

On Friday, Google joined in on the eclipse frenzy by adding a cool animation that gives its users an interactive feel at their own leisure.

Google users who search about the eclipse can see a graphic overlay depicting what millions on the path of totality will see Monday : the moment when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, revealing just the sun's outermost layer called the corona.

“The moon is having its day in the sun, and people across North America are coming to Google to learn more and celebrate this rare event," Jessica Yu, Google's doodle team lead, told USA TODAY. "We’re excited to mark the 2024 solar eclipse with special experiences on Search for eclipse watchers.”

Yu said that a team of user experience designers created the animation to engage its users.

Science and technology lovers can enjoy the animation by searching specific keywords.

How can you see Google's total solar eclipse animation?

To see the animation for yourself, users can type the following into the search engine at google.com :

• April 8 eclipse
• Eclipse 2024
• Solar eclipse
• Solar eclipse 2024

Here is what you should see on your screen:

When is the total solar eclipse?

On April 8, a total solar eclipse is expected to pass over he United States, Mexico and Canada.

Nearly 28% of the U.S. will experience the eclipse's journey through the country for a few minutes, NASA r eports.

What states will get to see the solar eclipse?

The path of the eclipse will enter the U.S. in Texas, and pass through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, according to NASA, which added that some parts of Michigan and Tennessee will also experience it.

When was the last solar eclipse?

The last total solar eclipse in the U.S. happened on Aug. 21, 2017. In October, skygazers were delighted by a rare "ring of fire" solar eclipse , where the moon slides in front of the sun but doesn't totally obscure it, creating a halo effect.

Ahjané Forbes is a reporter on the National Trending Team at USA TODAY. Ahjané covers breaking news, car recalls, crime, health, lottery and public policy stories. Email her at  [email protected] . Follow her on  Instagram ,  Threads  and  X @forbesfineest.

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Solar eclipse 2024: Follow the path of totality

Solar eclipse, how to help your kids enjoy the solar eclipse.

The NPR Network

Getting your kids ready to enjoy the eclipse? If you've got curious kiddos enjoying the eclipse today, here are some resources from the NPR Network to help get the most out of the experience:

Eclipse learning guide for kids via Vermont Public

• Pre-K to Grade 2
• Grade 3 to 5
• Grade 6 to 12

Amy Nickell with Dallas Arboretum helps Dani Turin, 5, look down the ruler at the sun and the moon to see the perspective of the eclipse Monday at Dallas Cotton Bowl Stadium. Yfat Yossifor/KERA hide caption

Amy Nickell with Dallas Arboretum helps Dani Turin, 5, look down the ruler at the sun and the moon to see the perspective of the eclipse Monday at Dallas Cotton Bowl Stadium.

Not able to get outside? Stream totality with your kiddo .

• WATCH: The difference between a solar and a lunar eclipse from KERA Kids
• LISTEN: has a new episode out about solar eclipses from But Why , Vermont Public's podcast for curious kids

Kid at heart? The Texas Standard has tips from Bill Nye on the best ways to enjoy the eclipse .

Do some color-based experimentation! The celestial phenomena can alter the way we see colors, so keep an eye on reds and greens and how they change over the course of totality!

• What do I do if my kid won't keep their eclipse glasses on?
• How can I make sure my eclipse glasses are legit?
• Simple tips to safely photograph the eclipse with your cellphone

And be prepared: As we found with kids who enjoyed the eclipse in 2017 , little ones may totally forget this celestial experience, so don't sweat it too much!

NPR will be sharing highlights from across the NPR Network throughout the day if you're unable to get out and see it in real time.

NPR's Emily Alfin Johnson produced this piece.

Harris Completes Steadfast Journey to Become Ireland's Youngest Premier

Harris Completes Steadfast Journey to Become Ireland's Youngest Premier

People applaud as Taoiseach Simon Harris looks on after receiving a majority parliamentary vote to become the next Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, in Dublin, Ireland, April 9, 2024. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

By Padraic Halpin

DUBLIN (Reuters) -When Simon Harris made headlines in his local County Wicklow newspaper in 2003 for criticising the government, the future Irish prime minister was described as "a well-known local activist". He was 16 years old.

Now 37, Harris became Ireland's youngest ever premier on Tuesday, an ascent that while swift owing to Leo Varadkar's shock departure, has also been more than 20 years in the making, say those who have worked with the ambitious political devotee.

He quit university aged 20 to work as a political aide, was elected a councillor at 22, a member of parliament at 24 and appointed to cabinet five months shy of his 30th birthday, where he would make his name helping steer the country's initial response to COVID-19.

His first boss, former Irish Deputy Prime Minister Frances Fitzgerald, recalls being struck at just how keen her future cabinet colleague was to work in politics, something that was "unusual enough, even then" for a 20-year-old.

"What I thought was how very impressive he was, how very eager, energetic, intelligent and interested but most of all how he really wanted to work in the political system," Fitzgerald, currently a member of the European parliament, told Reuters.

Photos You Should See - April 2024

Harris has spoken about how he became involved in politics to campaign for support for his autistic younger brother Adam. He set up an autism awareness charity aged 15, calling it "the formative experience of my life".

"I would say that's what defines him, he does believe in politics and to this day, he believes in the political system as the place to be to get things done," Fitzgerald said of her Fine Gael party colleague.

That description of a politician who works "all the hours of the day and night" was echoed by Niall Collins, a junior minister from coalition partners Fianna Fail, who has worked alongside Harris in the higher education ministry since 2020.

"His work ethic and attention to detail is enormous," Collins told national broadcaster RTE on Sunday.

RIGHT SHIFT?

With less than a year to leave his mark in office before he must call a general election, Harris' chief political challenge will be clawing back the more than three-year unbroken opinion poll lead the main opposition Sinn Fein party has on its rivals.

A recent slide in support for the left-wing party has opened up a possible path to re-election for another Fine Gael and Fianna Fail-led government. Polls suggest they may need the support of increasingly popular independent candidates, an arrangement the first government Harris was part of relied on in 2016.

One non-party aligned member of that cabinet, left-wing independent Finian McGrath, said that unlike some of his Fine Gael colleagues, Harris was open to compromise, a trait that could well be needed for future coalition building.

"I didn't think I was going to get on well with him because I wouldn't be on Fine Gael's page at all, but I did," McGrath, who worked with Harris in the health department from 2016 to 2020, told Reuters.

"He might give the impression that he's a bit nerdy and some people think he's the best boy in class and all that stuff, but no actually, you go for a pint with him and he's great craic (fun)."

While inheriting a three-party coalition will leave Harris little room for major new policy initiatives, he is under pressure from lawmakers to move Fine Gael back towards its traditionally centre-right position.

Harris described Fine Gael on Sunday as "a centrist party", saying he was proud of the role he played as health minister in the 2018 referendum to remove a ban on abortion, while at the same time placing a renewed focus on law and order and helping farmers.

Though Fitzgerald described her one-time parliamentary assistant as "very adaptable, flexible and not ideological", she doubts he will shift Fine Gael away from its current position.

"I don't believe this talk about Fine Gael pivoting to the right, he is not going to disown the social progress that has been made in Ireland," she said.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin, editing by Ed Osmond)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Tags: Ireland , European Union , Europe

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Kohl’s Senior Manager of Technical Services Reflects on Morgridge Center’s Role in Professional Journey

What first drew Sydney Onesti to the Morgridge Center? Put simply: she was looking for a college job related to her industrial engineering degree. However, after working as the transportation intern at the Morgridge Center for two years and loving the environment of the center, Onesti’s position “ended up being the best of both worlds.”

 “My role at the Morgridge Center ended up being the best of both worlds, like it was better than I was even expecting for so many reasons,” she says.

Onesti currently works as senior manager of Technical Services at Kohl’s. Onesti graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2020 with a degree in industrial engineering and worked as a transportation intern at the Morgridge Center from 2018-20. 

As a transportation intern at the Morgridge Center, Onesti coordinated transportation to connect volunteers with their community partner site. In this position, Onesti was able to further the Morgridge Center’s mission by working on the administrative end of the center, rather than being directly involved with volunteering. She has always enjoyed seeing the real time impacts of her work, she says, and experienced this benefit as a transportation intern.

“I’d be walking to classes in college, and I’d see someone hopping in a Union Cab, and they could be going to their volunteer community site,” Onesti says. “And that was really cool to see that I might have had a little part in that.”

Through her role at the Morgridge Center, Onesti learned valuable skills like time management and effective communication. When students would come to the center with transportation issues, Onesti gained experience with constructive criticism through addressing these issues and adjusting the program to run more smoothly and efficiently. This process of incorporating feedback is especially relevant in her career in industrial engineering, she says.

After Onesti started working at the Morgridge Center, she began strongly recommending the Morgridge Center internships to all her friends because of the outstanding environment at the center. From bonding with interns over hard days at school to winning the “Best Cornbread” award at the Annual Morgridge Center Chili Cook Off – despite making the cornbread from a box, she admits, four years later – Onesti thoroughly enjoyed her time at the Morgridge Center. 

“I would tell all my friends, or anyone who would listen, ‘you need to apply here right now,’” Onesti says. “Just because of the role and the experience you get, but also the community that is there. Everyone was so supportive, and just genuinely good people. It was such a great environment to be around day in and day out.”

While Onesti’s current position at Kohl’s doesn’t directly interact with public service, corporate social responsibility plays a role as she helps promote sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as ethical work practices in the company. The Kohl’s company also offers a corporate volunteering program , encouraging staff to give back to the community. 

Onesti says an engineering education can bring a unique problem solving and analytical lens to addressing big social problems, an example of the diverse variety of connections between professional fields and public service. 

Nearly four years into her career journey at Kohl’s, Onesti knows her position at the Morgridge Center played a role in her professional path. Onesti credits the Morgridge Center for helping her build critical professional skills and create a competitive resume, she says, and deeply appreciates her time at the center. 

“The world can be a heavy and scary place sometimes, and it’s just extremely comforting to know that there’s places like the Morgridge Center that bring light and action for public good in our community,” Onesti says. “I think it’s just a really special place, and I’m glad that I was able to be a part of it while I was at UW–Madison.”

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How mosquito larva guts could help create highly specific insecticides

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Chemical Probes to Interrogate the Extreme Environment of Mosquito Larval Guts” Journal of the American Chemical

Did you know that the world’s deadliest animal is the mosquito? And Aedes aegypti is one of the most dangerous. This bug spreads viruses that cause dengue fever, which was recently declared as an epidemic in Puerto Rico. Research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports new molecules that label proteins in the unique, alkaline environment of the Ae. aegypti digestive system that could help scientists develop insecticides to fight back.

Though mosquito insecticides exist, the pests are developing resistances, and advancements are needed to reduce their numbers and slow the spread of pathogens they carry, including the malaria parasite and the Zika and dengue viruses. Fortunately for scientists, the digestive system of certain mosquito larvae, including Ae. aegypti, is unique: A pH spikes at the beginning of their midgut, creating a highly alkaline region, then tapers off to a more neutral pH environment as digestion continues. So, Michael Riehle, John Jewett and colleagues wanted to develop molecular probes that would react to this change in pH, only “activating” in the alkaline portion of the midgut.

The team synthesized two base-reactive molecules and a control molecule for their test probes. These were each introduced to groups of 30 to 40 mosquito larvae, which took them up via filter feeding and passed them through their digestive systems. In the alkaline midgut, the two new base-reactive molecules underwent a series of chemical changes, allowing them to bind to proteins in the gut and be detected by the researchers using fluorescence. Larvae that ingested the control molecule did not exhibit this fluorescence. Reaching and labeling larval gut proteins with these molecular probes creates targets that could one day be used to develop new insecticides, according to the team. Additionally, since most organisms have neutral or acidic digestive systems, these alkaline-specific molecular probes wouldn’t affect them, minimizing possible side effects and making future insecticides highly specific for their target. The researchers say that this specificity and adaptability could make insecticides more resilient to change and more effective at fighting mosquito-borne illnesses.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation, the 2023 Technology Research Initiative Fund and the National Institutes of Health.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News . ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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‘A mystical experience’: millions watch total solar eclipse sweep across North America

Almost 32 million people in the path of totality as moon’s shadow crossed the Mexico-Texas border and then traversed 15 states

• If you missed the total solar eclipse just wait … until 2044
• Total solar eclipse over Mexico, US and Canada – in pictures

The ethereal spectacle of a total solar eclipse swept across North America on Monday afternoon, giving tens millions of people in Mexico, the US and Canada the chance to witness a rare and dazzling celestial show .

Almost 32 million people were in the path of totality as the moon’s shadow crossed the Mexico-Texas border at lunchtime and traversed 15 states over the next hour and a half, although many, especially in the south and midwest, were denied a clear view by low clouds and rain.

Those who did get to experience it were treated to a remarkable and surprisingly emotional display that won’t be seen again in the US until 2044 . Cities were plunged into sudden darkness, chilled by a precipitous drop in temperature, and felt the stillness of twilight in the middle of the day.

“There’s something very mysterious about a total solar eclipse, when literally day turns to night, animals start to behave differently, and we see changes in the Earth’s atmosphere,” Pam Melroy, the deputy head of Nasa, and a retired astronaut who has degrees in astronomy and planetary sciences, told CNN.

“It’s a mystical, mysterious experience. And I love the thought that millions of Americans stood together today, looking up into the sky.”

Tourism officials believe at least 4 to 5 million traveled from other parts of the US to witness the show, making it the country’s biggest travel day of the year and bringing in an estimated $1.5bn economic boost .

Many were up before dawn to stake their place, and cities from Texas to Maine, as well as others outside the path of totality, hosted watch parties and gave away free eclipse glasses.

Joe Biden posted a message from the White House, calling the eclipse an event “worth marveling at”, and urging Americans to use safety glasses to look at the sun.

The Dallas-Fort Worth region was the largest metropolitan area on the path of totality, making north Texas a major destination and creating potential headaches for locals. The cloudy weather left some scrambling at the last minute to change plans and head for clearer skies, but for much of north Texas totality itself was clear.

Ignas Barauskas traveled to Texas from Lithuania, arriving at midnight, just hours before the eclipse began.

“Better than all expectations,” he told the Guardian, after the clouds parted and Dallas experienced almost four minutes of blackout.

“Everyone was screaming, like a concert,” he added.

For many, the experience proved costly, with surging air fares and exorbitant hotel rates. Others found long-held bookings canceled and resold to new customers at up to three times their original prices.

Such was the interest in the eclipse that numerous states and municipalities declared states of emergency in expectation of massive crowds. The entire event, however, appears to have passed off peacefully, amid warnings from US intelligence of a rise in the terror threat , particularly for large gatherings, following last month’s deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall .

Nasa live streamed the event for those who could not see the eclipse directly or lived outside the path of totality. Almost everywhere in North America experienced a partial eclipse of varying percentages depending on the proximity to its center track.

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The agency also conducted science experiments. It fired rockets into the moon’s shadow to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected by the momentary dimming of sunlight and the possible impact on communications systems, and it harnessed an army of citizen volunteers to capture images of the solar corona during totality, then help analyze them afterwards.

Meanwhile, at several zoos, researchers joined public volunteers to watch the behavior of animals . During previous eclipses, giraffes ran around frantically, tortoises started rutting and gibbons sang and barked, although television images of zebras at Dallas zoo on Monday showed them largely unimpressed by the event.

The most recent total solar eclipse in the US was in 2017 , but an interval of only seven years is unusual. This one had a longer track, and a wider shadow of totality than seven years ago because the moon was closer to Earth.

The time of totality in any given location was also longer. In 2017, the longest duration anywhere was two minutes and 42 seconds. Today it was four minutes and 28 seconds in Torreón, Mexico , while almost every place along the path experienced between three and a half to four minutes of totality, even if those below could not always see the eclipse.

The next total solar eclipse anywhere in the world is 12 August 2026 , covering large areas of the northern hemisphere, with totality limited to Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and a small area of Portugal. The UK will see a partial eclipse of more than 90%.

Residents of the mainland US must wait until 22 August 2044 , when a total eclipse will be seen in North and South Dakota and Montana, plus northern Canada.

Following that, it is almost exactly one year until the next coast-to-coast total eclipse in the US, on 12 August 2045 , spanning California to Florida.

Additional reporting by Charlie Scudder

• Solar eclipses

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Science Weekly Horny tortoises and solar mysteries: what scientists can learn from a total eclipse – podcast

Total solar eclipse: millions watched rare spectacle as moon blocked sun in Mexico, US and Canada – as it happened

Solar eclipse: parts of UK crane for a ‘small grazing’

Bad omens and deep-state lunacy: solar eclipse brings wave of memes

What do animals do during an eclipse? Observers in US zoos hope to find out

US eclipse travelers met with sky-high prices – and reservation snafus

How and when to watch today’s total solar eclipse

Incarcerated people in New York will get to see eclipse after settling lawsuit

‘I get emotional thinking about it’: US and Canada ready for total solar eclipse

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Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies

By Amanda Petrusich

In the fall of 2021, the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers entered the graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. For anyone unacquainted with the particulars of the degree Rogers was pursuing—a master’s in religion and public life—it might have sounded as though she were abandoning burgeoning pop stardom to reinvent herself as a priest. “It’s a peace-and-justice program, it’s not a seminary,” Rogers told me over dinner in Cambridge, in early February. “I’m not from any particular religious tradition. I was not trained in any particular religious tradition.” Rogers, who is twenty-nine, was trying to make her life feel more useful and less surreal. “I woke up one day and I was famous,” she said. “I was really burnt out. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I thought I wanted to quit music. A lot of what I came here to do was to think about how to create a more sustainable structure around a creative practice.” This spring, Rogers will release her third album, “Don’t Forget Me,” a breezy collection of pop-rock songs that she wrote in consecutive order, during five kinetic, bountiful days last winter. It is, in many ways, the loosest and most elemental music she’s made.

In 2016, Rogers was “discovered”—though the word almost feels too intentional—by the polymath hitmaker Pharrell Williams, while she was attending New York University. Williams visited one of Rogers’s classes at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a program within the Tisch School of the Arts; he was an artist-in-residence there, and she was a senior. The institute is the sort of place where, say, Questlove might teach a seven-week course on the Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys might show up on the final day. During Williams’s visit, Rogers played him an early version of “Alaska,” a song she’d written after going to Berlin and having “a really spiritual experience” with dance music. “Club culture, for an N.Y.U. freshman or sophomore, always meant tight dresses, a certain amount of money, the meatpacking district,” Rogers said. “I didn’t have clothes for that.” The scene in Berlin was different—less preening, more raw. “They said I had to wear sneakers or I wouldn’t get in,” Rogers recalled. Meanwhile, she was learning more about how to produce and manipulate rhythm, using both analog and electronic elements (drums, bass, synthesizers, outboard gear, programming software). “I had always thought that singing was the oldest and most primal way to connect,” she said. “When I discovered the connection people can have through rhythm, something really changed.”

“Alaska” is a brittle meditation on interpersonal dissonance. “You and I, there’s air in between,” Rogers sings on the chorus. That tension is deftly mirrored in the song’s sound. There’s something earthy about Rogers’s presence (she was brought up in rural Maryland, and played the harp and the banjo as a teen-ager), yet the song’s production is spectral, icy, electronic. Rogers told me that she wrote “Alaska” in five minutes, which is how she often works: urgently and with deep focus, as though she were channelling a faint signal.

Williams’s meeting with the class was filmed. Rogers was wearing jeans, a thrifted L. L. Bean shirt, and a necklace made from two elk vertebrae strung on cooking twine. She told Williams that she had previously made only folk music. Her professor, the producer and engineer Bob Power, interrupted: “But kind of postmodern stuff, too. It was not just boom-chicka-boom-chicka.” She clarified her intentions for the track. “All I want to do is kind of combine that folk imagery and harmony and natural samples that I’ve been picking up while hiking over the last couple years with the sort of backbone and energy of dance music,” she said. “We’ll see if I’m successful.” As the song started to play, Rogers seemed a little unsure of where to direct her gaze. The video is endearing: a young artist presenting her work and nervously awaiting judgment. It soon becomes clear that Williams is feeling it. When the track ends, he tells her that he has “zero, zero, zero notes,” and then compares her individuality to that of the Wu-Tang Clan. “I can hear the journey,” Williams tells her. “I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that. . . . That’s a drug for me.”

The full thirty-minute clip of the class, including Williams’s responses to other students, was uploaded to his label’s YouTube channel in March of that year; in June, a fan posted Rogers’s portion to Reddit. It didn’t take long for the clip to go viral. One of Rogers’s childhood friends, Nora Neil, remembered Rogers calling to say that she was trending on Reddit. “I was at my grandmother’s house,” Neil recalled. “And I said, ‘I unfortunately do not know what that means.’ That first day, those first few hours, it was, like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ . . . Her life really did change overnight.”

Rogers was one of the first pop stars to achieve fame by unintentionally captivating the Internet, and, strangely, she was also one of the last. These days, virality is not so much a lightning strike as a marketing scheme, reverse engineered by executives and masquerading as serendipity. A. & R. representatives often scout new talent by dissecting social-media numbers, as though music could be a “Moneyball”-style game of statistics. But in 2016 the online-to-IRL catapult was still unpredictable. It was exhilarating to watch the arc of its fling.

It helped that the distinctive sound of “Alaska”—a fusion of organic and synthesized—was beginning to take hold in independent music. For a brief moment, it seemed as though drum machine meets trail mix might be the next big vibe. A bidding war broke out among interested record labels. Rogers eventually signed with Capitol, where she was given her own imprint, Debay Sounds. In early 2017, she released an adventurous, genre-bending EP, “Now That the Light Is Fading,” which included an updated version of “Alaska.” She was invited to appear on the “Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” conspicuous bookings for an artist who had officially released only a handful of songs. Those early performances were magnetic. The first time I saw her live—in April, 2017, at Music Hall of Williamsburg, a six-hundred-and-fifty-person venue in Brooklyn—the room had the charged feel of a tent revival. Onstage, Rogers can be a little wild. Her movement is spontaneous, erratic; she can appear almost possessed. In the video for “Alaska,” she strides through a forest at dusk, wearing jeans and a baggy zippered sweatshirt, her hair down, no visible makeup, periodically twisting and jerking her body in a way that reminds me of both the best modern dancers and my toddler when she hears the Supremes.

Rogers told me that when she was in middle school she won an essay contest with a piece about watching other people have fun. “I fit in enough —I’ve always had amazing friends,” she said. “I don’t mean to self-aggrandize, like I’m some great weirdo. I think I’m a pretty normal dude.” She paused, and laughed. “But also, I’m pretty abnormal.” She described her favorite artists as “fearless freaks,” and said that she believes a little bit of estrangement can be a useful creative tool: “To make something real, sometimes it helps to know what it’s like to not be like everybody else.”

Rogers’s first full-length album, “Heard It in a Past Life,” came out in January, 2019, and débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The following year, she was up for Best New Artist at the Grammys. Speaking about it now, Rogers tends to emphasize that her time line was measured, nearly quaint by some standards—almost three years passed between her viral moment and the release of her first LP—but it’s clear that the pace and the scale of her success were nonetheless unnerving. On “Light On,” a single from “Heard It in a Past Life,” Rogers sings of feeling alienated, panicked:

Tried to slow it all down Crying in the bathroom, had to figure it out With everyone around me saying “You must be so happy now”

“I was so young, but I was also old compared with the age of people going through it now. I got to fully develop, go to college, fuck off, and think I was gonna be a journalist,” she told me. “I was in dumb bands playing in clubs and there’s no footage of it.” The experience of being thrust into celebrity meant, ironically, that she didn’t have time to make music. “I’d never been less of an artist than when I became a professional artist,” she said. “There was a really specific moment, in 2017 or 2018, where I was at camera blocking for what must have been my fourth or fifth or sixth late-night performance singing ‘Alaska.’ I had a massive panic attack. I was just, like, ‘What the fuck is my life?’ I felt like a show pony.”

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Rogers’s second album, “Surrender,” from 2022—a hungry, carnal pop record about yearning for transcendence—shares a title with her master’s thesis; her appearance at Coachella in April of that year fulfilled the degree’s public-presentation component. Rogers is now in the midst of a postgraduate fellowship, which will end in May. She’s using the time to adapt her thesis into a book, a process she has found similar, in one way, to songwriting. “You have to be specific about experience,” she said. The manuscript focusses on the idea of creativity as a form of religion, and stardom as a kind of default modern pulpit. “Early in my career, people were using religious language to describe my shows,” she said. “ Rolling Stone published a piece in 2019 with the headline ‘Maggie Rogers: Festival Healer.’ The BBC published one that said ‘Billie Eilish is my cult leader. . . . Maggie is my God.’ ”

Headlines are overblown by design, but her audience’s devotion—something akin to worship—was real. The tumult of the Trump Administration and the pandemic meant that Rogers’s fans, like everyone, were increasingly desperate for moral guidance. But Rogers was, too. “I was looking for answers, just the same as everybody else,” she said. “It was really jarring—people asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform. I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training. Anyway, that’s how I made it to divinity school. What I ended up doing was developing a system for myself to hold these things. And then I went out and tested it.”

On a recent press tour in Britain, Rogers was reminded of how much more at ease she feels now. “I was being asked to do quippy promo stuff,” she said. “But that’s not who I am or what I do. The twenty-two-year-old version of me just wanted to be great at this thing. But I can’t improv with you—I can’t be the cool, funny girl.” She went on, “I wanted to have this life, and I was willing to do whatever I needed to do to support it. But then I learned that there had to be boundaries, because I’d walk away feeling like I’d betrayed myself.”

After our dinner, Rogers suggested that we visit the Emerson Chapel, a stately, wood-panelled room where she took a writing class with the author and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams. She zipped up a long parka, and we walked across Cambridge, propelled by a glacial wind. The campus was quiet. Rogers swiped us into the building. In 1838, the transcendentalist poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address to a group of six graduates and their theology professors in the room. Emerson had resigned from his position as a Unitarian minister after growing frustrated by the way that Church doctrine cloistered the sacred and the profane. In his address, he suggested that God is present in everything. “He was basically, like, ‘What if the light outside was God?’ ” Rogers said. The room smelled of lemon oil. “I only feel ready for this now ,” she said, of her career. “I feel O.K. in the center of it. Finally.” We hung around, admiring the stained glass and the pipe organ, until a security guard appeared in the doorway and said that it was time to leave.

Rogers made “Don’t Forget Me” at Electric Lady, a recording studio on West Eighth Street, in Greenwich Village. One afternoon, she offered to give me a tour. The studio was built in 1970 for Jimi Hendrix, who died less than a month after it opened but remains its guiding spirit; in a portrait that hangs in a stairwell, he’s wearing some kind of exquisite jacket, four or five necklaces, a thin mustache. His eyes are cast downward. The air smells permanently of palo santo. On a coffee table were bowls of fresh fruit and jelly beans, and a copy of that morning’s Times . Rogers used to live on West Fourth Street. “I studied studios,” she said. “I would walk by every day and look at my reflection in the mirrored glass and be, like, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever get to record here.’ It was a place that I saw myself literally, physically reflected in, during a moment in my life where I was still really, really, really dreaming.”

Even though “Don’t Forget Me” wouldn’t be released for another month, Rogers was already working on songs for her next album. She speaks about songwriting as a full-body process. “When I’m writing, the first thing I do is take my shoes off. My hands get hot. It’s so fucking physical,” she said. The work also seems to require a kind of spiritual stillness. “It’s like a puzzle,” she said. “If you can keep your focus on it for long enough, it appears. It’s right there —but the second your brain moves it’s gone.” She often enters a kind of hyper-focussed state. “When I’m onstage, or when I’m making something, I’m not thinking about who I am or what I’m trying to do. Time gets really sinewy. It’s spidery and slow. There’s wonder. And it’s just special, and I’m in it , and my hands are up, and I’m figuring it out. And then I come out of it, and it doesn’t even ever feel like it was mine to begin with.”

Since “Heard It in a Past Life,” Rogers has mostly eschewed dance music for a fuller, more rock-and-roll-inflected sound. “Don’t Forget Me” reminds me of the mid-seventies output of Linda Ronstadt and Carole King—burly, coltish, tender, fun. Rogers is no longer reliant on confessional first-person writing. “I was picturing a girl in her twenties on a road trip,” she said. “In my brain, this record takes place within the span of twenty-four or forty-eight hours. It felt like writing a movie, scene by scene.” One track, “Never Going Home,” is a rollicking, propulsive recounting of a night out, part Shania Twain, part Sheryl Crow: “We get to talking, but those lips aren’t your lips / We lean together, those hips aren’t your hips,” Rogers sings. She told me, “I’ve never lived that story, but I can picture a version of my life where I was going through a breakup and a friend was, like, ‘Shut the fuck up, we’re going out,’ and took me dancing and made me make out with some guy.” Inhabiting different characters enabled Rogers to be goofier, friskier, more mischievous. “So Sick of Dreaming” contains a chatty spoken interlude about getting stood up at a steak house which ends with “I mean, what a loser!” I told Rogers that there was a giddiness to her delivery on this album that I hadn’t heard before. “My friends all said, ‘This is the side of you that we see,’ ” she said.

Rogers wrote most of the record with the producer Ian Fitchuk. They met in Los Angeles in 2019, when Fitchuk was there for the Grammy Awards. (He was a co-writer and co-producer on Kacey Musgraves’s “Golden Hour,” which won both Album of the Year and Best Country Album.) Rogers was having dinner with the writer Lizzy Goodman, who, years earlier, had hired Rogers as an intern and tasked her with transcribing many of the hundreds of hours of interviews that later made up “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Goodman’s oral history of the post-9/11 downtown rock scene. After dinner, Rogers and Goodman were going to see the Strokes. “I scared her when I said hi and introduced myself,” Fitchuk recalled. In November, 2022, Rogers sent him a D.M. “We hopped on the phone, and he said, ‘You haven’t captured your live performance on a record yet.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, that’s completely true,’ ” she told me. “My record brain and my performance brain are binary. They’ve always felt like separate crafts to me, in a way. The spontaneity is the through line.”

She and Fitchuk booked studio time that December. “I didn’t have any songs written, there was no mood board, no color board, no feeling of ‘I need to document this thing in my life.’ Everything, everything , was a first take,” Rogers said. “I was playing instruments. Ian was playing instruments. I knew when something felt like me and when it didn’t. It was really instinctual.” She added, “We worked from ten to five. I went to dinner with my friends after.”

“Often, a song was fully formed in less than an hour, and then it was on to the next,” Fitchuk said. “I find that it’s easier to work with artists who have strong opinions,” he added. “It makes it easier to know when you’re on the right path.”

Despite the album’s effervescence, many of its tracks describe the protracted dissolution of a romantic relationship. “So much of this record is a breakup album,” Rogers said. “In the time since I made it, I actually have gone through a breakup.” That relationship, which Rogers said lasted five years, ended peacefully. “I’ve really grappled with that for the last couple months,” she said. “What does it mean? It wasn’t a premonition.” For now, Rogers described her heartache as falling in love backward. “You’re as on fire and awake to the world,” she said. “Music sounds better. Food sucks.” She added, “I’ve never been single, really. I’m in a grief season with it. But I also feel a sense of freedom.”

I told Rogers that I’d noticed a theme in her lyrics: the possibility of loving someone without possessiveness or panic. “Oh,” she said. “That’s cool. That’s how I feel about love.” She paused. “I think, in choosing someone, I want to be chosen back. You know? So much of this record is about mutual culpability.” She continued, “The art that means the most to me has some friction. To me, living a beautiful life is so much about devotion, and devotion to art is about telling the truth. That’s not always an easy story to tell, especially when it points back to ‘I’m fucked up, too.’ ”

In late February, Rogers performed at Carnegie Hall, as part of a benefit concert for Tibet House, a nonprofit created at the behest of the Dalai Lama, to protect Tibetan culture under Chinese occupation. The composer Philip Glass, a co-founder of the U.S. iteration of the organization, had sent Rogers a handwritten letter inviting her to participate. “I think you would enjoy it,” he had said.

Rogers told me that she was thinking about dressing “like Beethoven” for the event, and pulled up a selfie in which she was wearing black suit trousers paired with a white ruffled shirt, not unlike the infamous frilly blouse featured in the “Seinfeld” episode “The Puffy Shirt.” “I love clothes,” she told me later. “I love the world-building. That’s the childlike part of me. It’s also an environmental factor that helps me switch between my different brains. Putting the uniform on.” When she performed on the “Today” show shortly after “Heard It in a Past Life” came out, she wore a vintage T-shirt with a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt on it, tucked into high-waisted silk pants. “I was so terrified of being sexualized in any way that I kind of crushed my own sexuality in an effort to protect myself,” she said. Now her look alternates between vaguely professorial and something more glamorous. She has adopted a different hair style for each record, including long, surfer-girl waves for “Heard It in a Past Life” and a dramatic pixie cut for “Surrender.” These days, she wears her hair golden and shoulder-length. “It’s not, like, a pop-star thing,” she said, of the changes. “Anyone who’s known me for ten-plus years is, like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this again?’ I had a pixie cut in the sixth grade, in the eleventh grade, and my sophomore year of college.” I brought up a line from “Alaska.” (“Cut my hair so I could rock back and forth / Without thinking of you.”) “Thank you!” she said, laughing. “I have receipts! To me, it’s about the externalization of an internal transition. It’s sort of the same way I’m not good at hiding the way I feel. I’ll tell you. Or you can just check out my haircut.”

At rehearsals the day before the Carnegie Hall show, Rogers met Joan Baez, who was also scheduled to perform. Rogers told me that she had long admired Baez and her “writer-bohemian” contemporaries, such as Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell. “That’s the lineage that I want to write into,” Rogers said. While the rock band Gogol Bordello ran through its set, Rogers, Baez, and the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson danced wildly on the side of the stage. Baez was doing a kind of euphoric jig; Anderson launched into a “Saturday Night Fever”-style arm roll. Rogers moved freely, lightly up and down, a blissful bounce that looked more like levitation.

Later that afternoon, Rogers and Baez decided to sing Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” together onstage. Dylan wrote the song in 1962. It’s the most treacherous kind of breakup tune, a little bitter, a little devastated: “I’m a-thinking and a-wonderin’ walking down the road / I once loved a woman, a child, I’m told / I give her my heart but she wanted my soul / But don’t think twice, it’s all right.” Rogers called her parents and encouraged them to come up from Maryland for the concert.

The next evening began with a chanted prayer by Tibetan monks, followed by Anderson performing a version of her song “Walk the Dog,” infused with spoken koans: “We don’t know where we come from,” she intoned. “We don’t know what we are.” What followed was appealingly loose. There were some sound problems—at one point, Michael Riesman, of the Philip Glass Ensemble, performing a section of “Music in Twelve Parts,” abruptly stood up from his keyboard and strode toward the sound board, looking pissed—but the energy was pure. “I am here to read an Allen Ginsberg poem while wearing Fenty Beauty concealer,” the comedian Bowen Yang announced, before reciting “Who Be Kind To,” a lusty and ecstatic piece from 1965. (“Desire given with meat hand and cock, desire taken with / mouth and ass, desire returned.”)

Rogers had nixed the Beethoven ensemble and was wearing a less aggressively collared shirt. She ran through an acoustic version of “Alaska,” backed by the Scorchio Quartet. It was followed by “Don’t Forget Me,” accompanied by the Patti Smith Band. Rogers’s voice gets a little raw on the chorus:

So close the door and change the channel Give me something I can handle A good lover, or someone who’s nice to me Take my money, wreck my Sundays Love me til your next somebody Oh, but promise me that when it’s time to leave Don’t forget me

Soon after that, it was time for the duet. Dylan likely didn’t write “Don’t Think Twice” about Baez, though they were involved in the early sixties, breaking up for good in 1965, as Dylan’s career was taking off. “I think about her and Bob Dylan—it just makes me want to fucking wreck that dude,” Rogers told me. “That song—the more I play it, the more I’m, like, ‘This shit’s fucking sad.’ ‘Don’t Forget Me,’ too. Both are sad as shit. The idea that the baseline is just someone to be nice to me—fuck, man.” Baez’s voice is lower, heavier, and grittier these days; when Rogers joined in for harmonies, it felt like a butterfly landing on a tree branch. They swapped the song’s pronouns (“I once loved a boy, a child, I’m told,” they bellowed), which gave it a pleasantly vengeful feel. The crowd went nuts. Later on, offstage, Baez told Rogers, “You sang all the notes I would have sung.”

Beginning when she was nine, Rogers spent her summers at Wohelo, an all-girls camp founded in 1907, on Sebago Lake, in Maine. There is no electricity or running water in the cabins. One morning, she texted me some old, sepia-toned photos of the place: girls in modest bathing costumes, rowing canoes. “I learned to write letters,” she said. “There were limits on technology in my life growing up that kept my inner kid safe for a long time.” For high school, she attended St. Andrew’s, a boarding school situated on more than two thousand bucolic, wooded acres in Middletown, Delaware. These traditional institutions—including, more recently, Harvard—are steeped in a sense of stoicism, seriousness, and erudition. They have had an undeniable aesthetic and spiritual influence on her. “It wasn’t until I saw ‘The Holdovers’ that I was, like, ‘I am deeply the product of this environment,’ ” Rogers told me. “I’m so obsessed with creating something that feels timeless but modern.”

Rogers, by her own admission, can be intense. “I’m so fucking headstrong,” she told me one morning. We were eating fried eggs at Washington Square Diner, an old-school breakfast joint near N.Y.U. “I’m not wishy-washy in any way. People get scared of me. But the right people aren’t scared.” In conversation, Rogers is open, generous, and cerebral. But she is not prone to abiding inanity. (Once, when I was pestering her to describe her childhood, she stopped me, suggested that I could probably find most of the information I was looking for online, and then said, “This is a little bit like fact-check-y speed dating,” which did not feel like a celebration of my reportorial prowess.) “I’m fundamentally in the business of selling my own emotions,” she said. “There has to be some real humanity kept sacred.”

It’s easy to be skeptical of artists who suggest that no, really, they can take it or leave it—celebrity requires constant and effortful maintenance, after all—but I came to believe Rogers when she said that she was more interested in the process of making things than in whatever happens afterward. For years, I heard the single “Light On” as about love doomed by bad timing—a person asking, earnestly, What if there was a way for us to hold and care for one another, beyond the sometimes impossible confines of a traditional relationship? The chorus presents a kind of compromise:

If you keep reaching out Then I’ll keep coming back If you’re gone for good Then I’m okay with that If you leave the light on Then I’ll leave the light on

During my time with Rogers, I started to hear the song as a rejoinder to fame. The sort of attention that she commanded at the start of her career has been supplanted by a quieter, steadier sort of stardom, and she is now focussed, she said, on recognizing “that the cup is full, and not overflowing, and how nice that is.” Buttering a triangle of toast, she continued, “That’s even better—there’s no mess. I’m trying to have a good time, and make shit that I love with people I love. If that works, if it communicates or connects, awesome. If it doesn’t, eighty thousand other records came out that day. It’s O.K!” She went on, “On ‘Heard It in a Past Life,’ I was very commercially ambitious. On ‘Surrender,’ I was very artistically ambitious. Now I’m in this era where it feels very personally ambitious, in the sense that I’m just trying to have the best time while I’m here.”

Musically, a focus on pleasure seems to suit her. The songs on “Don’t Forget Me” aren’t quite as tonally striking as “Alaska,” but they have an intoxicating ease: Rogers sounds unhurried, languid, free. I hear the single “So Sick of Dreaming” as a kind of modern companion piece to Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved,” a No. 1 country hit in 1975, written by the Everly Brothers. Both are refutations of selfish lovers, though “So Sick of Dreaming” contains a bolder declaration of independence. “I’m so sick of dreaming,” Rogers sings. “Oh, I’m all that I’m needing.”

I asked Rogers if she ever wished that her rise to fame had come about differently. She thought for a moment. “I wish that I had uploaded ‘Alaska’ myself,” she said. “But, because of the way it happened, this deeply unguarded version of myself as a student is the version people first saw. My authenticity was full and center. I didn’t have the chance to put on the mask.” She has also had to contend with another very famous person being an inextricable piece of her origin story. “I was being asked about him every single day, and had to be, like, ‘I don’t know him. You’ve seen everything,’ ” she said. More recently, she and Williams have reconnected. “Pharrell and I are friends now. He’s so cool—duh.”

The experience of performing “Alaska” at Carnegie Hall, in front of people culled from various corners of her life—her parents, classmates from Harvard, old professors, her musical peers, Joan Baez—felt like an apotheosis. “I’m gonna get emotional talking about it,” Rogers said, her eyes slowly filling with tears. “It’s been almost ten years since I wrote that song. I was thinking about the person who I was when I wrote it, and thinking about where I am now. I think the girl who wrote that song would be really proud.” She has been experiencing a lot of moments like this lately. In late March, she performed with Bruce Springsteen and the country singer Zach Bryan at the Barclays Center. “Craziest shit in the entire world,” she said the next morning. “My hand is purple. I overenthusiastically tambourined and gave myself a bruise.”

Rogers recently bought an apartment in New York. It was on a list of three things (find an apartment, release a new album, finish the book) that she wants to do before she turns thirty, at the end of April. One afternoon, she and I decided to visit the Dream House, a site-specific “sound and light environment” conceived in the nineteen-sixties by the minimalist composer La Monte Young and his wife, the multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. The Dream House has been situated in a two-room, third-floor space in Tribeca since 1993. (Young, who is eighty-eight, lives downstairs; Zazeela died last month.) Inside, two atonal compositions (one by Young and one by the artist Jung Hee Choi) play on large speakers. Neither of the pieces gestures toward melody or rhythm, and, because of the way that the speakers are arranged, every movement, however slight—a breath, a blink—changes the shape of the sound. Zazeela’s lights give the room a cool, pinkish-purplish glow. If you’ve ever walked by a buzzing neon sign late at night and wondered what it would be like if you could squeeze your entire body inside and slowly dissociate from time and space—welcome to the Dream House.

Shoes are not allowed, and, given the volume, talking isn’t possible. If you arrive with a companion, you will have to figure out a subtle little gesture to indicate to each other that your insides have been rearranged and you are ready to depart. The space features thick white carpeting. A stick of incense is perpetually crumbling to ash. After a while, Rogers and I sort of loonily nodded at each other, and stumbled back onto the street. She asked me if I knew how long we’d been inside. Time felt elastic. I guessed that it had been fifteen minutes—thirty, tops—though it had actually been an hour. “Dude,” Rogers said.

Outside, it was bracingly cold. We wandered around until we found a tiny champagne bar, which felt like an appropriate coda. Inside, we toasted to the Dream House, to dreams, to dreaming. Rogers said she’s trying to inch further away from the isolation of what she refers to as “first name, last name” pop stardom. It has been helpful to focus on music as an inherently communal practice, shared with her collaborators and her fans. “I had all these moments in the early years where I felt really alone,” she said. “I was putting so much of it onto one leg. Now it’s a tripod, and it’s so much more sturdy.” ♦

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