Racing Mount Pleasant Makes Quiet Emotions Sound Grand
The Frank O’Hara poem “Katy” features seven lines of self-assessing declarations. It is the fifth line that I get the most mileage out of: “I am never quiet, I mean silent.” When I am…
Section
Style
How to Survive Your Song Going Viral on TikTok
If you’ve heard the 2019 hit song “Tek It,” by the New York City-based band Cafuné, there’s a good chance it’s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube with…
When the Man Tried to Sell Minimalism to the Counterculture
“The Man can’t bust our music,” an advertisement in the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb proclaimed, in November, 1968. The accompanying image showed seven presumed radicals huddled in…
“Eden” Is a Desert-Island Thriller That Despoils Itself
The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron Howard, a director whose cinematic disposition can…
Cindy Sherman’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8, 2025,…
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat.…
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers…
New York City, Taco Town
Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a street-facing…
The High Femme Dystopia of Star Amerasu
If the recent embrace of seemingly—and only seemingly—autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in “The Matrix” awaits us. During the 1999…
Anthony Roth Costanzo Channels Maria Callas in “Galas”
Plus: the eclectic chaos of Haim, Trajal Harrell struts the catwalk at Park Avenue Armory, “Mamma Mia!” returns to Broadway, and more. Source link
“Splitsville” Plays Infidelity for Laughs; “A Little Prayer” Shows What’s Really at Stake
In the studiedly rambunctious comedy “Splitsville,” Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin play a pair of homewreckers. The home, a beachside vacation pad with natural-wood siding and…
“Honey Don’t!” Revives the Spirit of the Coen Brothers’ Movies
The main elements of Ethan Coen’s new film, “Honey Don’t!,” are sex and violence. Both involve profound sensations and potentially life-changing events; both reveal personality at its most…
Hilton Als’s Essential James Baldwin
A hundred and one years after James Baldwin’s birth, the writer has become as much an icon as a public intellectual can be—a status that, if justified by the beauty of his prose and the…
The Redemption of Chance the Rapper
When Chance the Rapper declared “I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail” on “Ultralight Beam,” the opener from West’s 2016 album, “The Life of Pablo,” the sentiment seemed self-evident.…
The Budding Rivalry of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner
“A person’s tennis,” John McPhee writes in “Levels of the Game,” from 1969, “begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and…
The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.
The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime pursuits on its lake and as a ski resort in winter.…
Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral’s “Artist in Training”
For many of us, spending time at the beach is one of the highlights of summer. The cover of the August 25, 2025, issue, by the artist Sergio García Sánchez and his wife, the colorist Lola…
The Sloppy Joe Makes a Kicky Comeback
Few words in the English language have the onomatopoeic satisfaction of “slop.” Its opening consonants evoke sludge and slipperiness, the round “O” and smacking “P” the liquid wallop of a…
Always Inadequate
In the late nineteen-sixties I lived for a year, with my then husband, in the middle of an apple orchard in northern New Mexico, some miles from the glorious Rio Grande Gorge. Our adobe…
“Highest 2 Lowest” Marks a Conservative Pivot for Spike Lee
It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s…
Fall Culture Preview
Few have captured infatuation like Schubert, three of whose lovelorn song cycles—“Die Schöne Müllerin,” “Winterreise,” and “Schwanengesang”—are performed in a single day, by the Brooklyn…
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I” Is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent
Because the Russian alphabet has no direct equivalent of the letter “H,” speakers often substitute a “G” sound; “Harry Potter” thus becomes “Garry Potter.” We’re reminded of this funny…
Roman Polanski’s Self-Centered “An Officer and a Spy”
The prime parallel between the movie “An Officer and a Spy” and the life of its director, Roman Polanski, is obvious but inexact. The film, whose original French title is “J’Accuse,” tells…
Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss
When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations of his career…