Style

How the Internet Left 4chan Behind
4chan was where I learned that the internet could be bad. I first encountered the site during high school, not long after its founding, in 2003, by an American...
How “The Great Gatsby” Took Over High School
In the spring of 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was worried about “The Great Gatsby.” It had been fifteen years since the novel was published, and the author had little...
The Return of “My Favorite Season,” a Great Modern Melodrama
Melodrama isn’t central to modern French cinema, because melodrama is rooted in irony, whereas one could hardly slip a playing card between most great French directors’ intentions and results....
The Rise of Megan Moroney, Emo Cowgirl
“I don’t write a whole lot of love songs,” Megan Moroney said last month, onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Fortunately, that’s not exactly true. Almost all her songs...
The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain
In 1857, Sam stumbled into the job that would shape his identity. Aboard a southbound steamboat—part of some half-baked scheme involving the Amazon River and coca—he met a pilot...
Jeremy Jordan Mines “Floyd Collins” for Its Sonic Gems
“The future of writing is the universe within,” the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel told an interviewer, in 2001. It had been five years since the Off Broadway première...
Francis, the TV Pope, Takes His Final Journey
Shortly after Pope Francis died, on Monday, the Vatican released a brief document he had authored in 2022, outlining his last testament: how and where he should be buried,...
A Georgian Restaurant’s Mother of All Dumplings
The restaurant’s head chef, Manuchar Tsikolia, is joined in the kitchen by Ruslan Giorgberidze, a dedicated khinkali cook (and an alumnus ofKhinkali House, a Guliani Group restaurant in Moscow),...
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean?She wasn’t sure, really. It had...
“April” Is an Unflinching Portrait of a Doctor’s Fight for Reproductive Justice
Before watching “April,” the new movie from the Georgian director and screenwriter Dea Kulumbegashvili, I had seen only one other fictional film that featured a real childbirth. It was...
Rema and the Evolution of the Afrobeats Sound
For many years, the term Afrobeats, referring to a West African pop style that integrates dancehall, rap, and R. & B. with traditional African rhythms, was controversial, rejected by...
The Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Elon Musk
Perhaps you’re an American waiting at a bus stop, in a country not your own, ruminating on the limits of democracy at home. A bus passes, and then another....