World
The Other Side of Sherman’s March
The second hour of “Gone with the Wind,” the bold, almost brazenly romantic Civil War epic that won ten Academy Awards, is largely a portrait of hell. “The skies...
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The Best-Selling Novelist Kaveh Akbar Leans Into His Poetic Roots
Kaveh Akbar may be best known for his début novel, “Martyr!” (a finalist for the National Book Award), but he began his career as a poet. Recently, he joined...
A Young Girl Questions Wearing a Head Scarf in “Rizoo”
When the filmmaker Azadeh Navai was five years old, her mother took her to have her photo taken for an I.D. And, before she knew it, a scarf was...
What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End
Being wrong puts off neither prophets nor their followers. The term “cognitive dissonance,” coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the nineteen-fifties, described an imbalance between conviction and information....
L.A.’s New-Music Bastion
The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on Micheltorena Street, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles....
The Player’s the Thing in “Grand Theft Hamlet”
In an 1818 lecture, on the subject of “Hamlet,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:Persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something...
What We See in Lauren Sanchez’s Cleavage
Remember a few years back when boobs were declared over? The data points supporting this claim were tenuous but nonetheless of some note. There was the Pornhub study from...
Liza Minnelli’s Desire to Touch
The avant-garde company Heartbeat Opera is engaging in another innovative game of source-text telephone, this time with a new iteration of “Salome.” The original draws from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous...
The Real-Life Drama of “Dying”
In observational documentaries, one important thing tends to be left unspoken: namely, why the films’ subjects let filmmakers embed in their lives. Without knowing what kind of visibility and...
The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
Between 1848 and 1852, more than twenty thousand Chinese migrants made their way to San Francisco in search of gold. The vast majority were men—rural peasants from Guangdong Province,...
