The Mother as Antihero
Sasha Bonét’s matrilineal memoir, “The Waterbearers,” traces the lives of her mother and grandmother: powerful, complicated women whose personalities have been shaped by the rough edges of…
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The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser
There’s an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it’s easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold. Artificial…
Gary Shteyngart’s Tragicomedy of the Penis in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong”
Watch “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong.” Gary Shteyngart was just seven years old when his family emigrated from the Soviet Union and settled in Queens. He remembers the transition as one of…
“The Lowdown” Is a Noir for Our Era
Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made an art form of falling apart with tragic…
The Autocrat of English Usage
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he…
The Uses and Abuses of “Antisemitism”
How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry. Source link
Picturing a Chinatown Family Across Twenty-Two Years
Once the family settled into their new normal, Holton resumed his photography. The tones of these prints are darker: shadows replace the bright colors, and family members are visibly…
What It’s Like to Get Really, Really High
Ojos del Salado rises more than twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, on Chile’s northeastern border. It is the world’s tallest volcano, towering over the world’s highest desert: an…
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The Metropolitan Opera Delves Into Comic Books
1. The beloved British polymath and broadcasting legend Melvyn Bragg, who joined the BBC in 1961, recently stepped down from his show “In Our Time,” which, since 1998, has delved into…
Robert Redford and the Perils of Perfection
Gentleman, preferred, blond: such was the job description of Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday, at the age of eighty-nine. Onscreen, he and his buddy Paul Newman were partners in crime,…
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” Is None of Those Things
If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the genre are hard to stick, because fantasy, by…
Yasmina Reza’s “Art” Feeds Our Appetite for Argument as Entertainment
Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as bad-faith confrontation thrives. The whole process of…
Great Gay Novels Recommended by the Director of “The History of Sound”
In Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “The History of Sound,” two young men at the New England Conservatory of Music meet in a bar, when one of them (Josh O’Connor) plays a folk song the other…
Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson Came from the Same Warped Online Worlds
Assassins and would-be assassins have become a sickeningly common feature of our polarized political landscape, and so have our rituals in the aftermath of the assailants’ heinous acts.…
Can You Really Live One Day at a Time?
This summer, I reread the novel “Aurora,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer whom I profiled a few years ago. Robinson has an ecological orientation, and “Aurora” is…
How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits…
Maira Kalman’s “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl”
The artist Maira Kalman has always had an idiosyncratic approach to defining elegance, having co-authored a book titled “(un)Fashion,” and illustrated E. B. White’s “The Elements of…
What I Wanted, What I Got
The popular girl at my elementary school—let’s call her Denise—was not blond like Barbie but pretty in a conventional manner I envied. She had brown hair, skin that tanned easily, and a…
“Megadoc” Shows Francis Ford Coppola Going for Broke on “Megalopolis”
Figgis comments that Coppola uses the script as a mere premise, and he likens Coppola’s approach to it as “instinctive,” calling the director “kind of like a jazz musician.” Voight, who…
Brittany Howard and Alabama Shakes Return with Audacious New Music
The first thing Julio Torres says in “Color Theories” is to deny that he’s made an “Off Broadway play.” (His ponytail, curling overhead like an anglerfish’s light, bobbles as he cringes.)…
The Muted, Melancholy Synesthetics of “The History of Sound”
In “The History of Sound,” a new romantic drama set during and after the First World War, passion is an intensely private thing, and in more ways than you might expect. Love and desire are…
The Return of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Masterpiece, “The Brothers Size”
At the beginning of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s poetic drama “The Brothers Size,” now at the Shed, one of the play’s three actors pours white sand—or is it salt?—in a circle on the otherwise…
“Cashing Out” Examines an Investment Strategy That Profited from AIDS Deaths
As grateful as I am to the director Matt Nadel for making “Cashing Out,” a vital and outstanding film about a terrible time, it also made me angry—angry about an epoch in our nation’s…
Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble
Do you know the one about the Jewish guy and the Muslim Turk? They gang up on this Christian friar and strangle him. Then they take him into the street and prop him up on a staff, as if he…