The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event
America’s influence went beyond haberdashery. Several of the world’s leading revolutionaries had spent time in the country. The English-born Thomas Paine started his radical career writing…
Tag
inverted
The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land
Church’s first important painting, completed in 1846, was “Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636,” which depicts early Pilgrims (among…
“Industry” Is a Study in Wasted Youths
In the new season of the hit HBO series, its young protagonists have left the trading floor that made them. Their second acts are revealing. Source link
Listening to Joe Rogan
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is free-form, runs…
Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism
That a handful of revolutionaries could collect airliners worth millions of dollars and hold Western passengers ransom made it appear the Palestinians had history on their side. They…
“Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It?
In 2023, the writer Patricia Lockwood chafed at Wallace’s supposed sainthood in a long piece for the London Review of Books. The essay, in its ambivalence, did things other than chafe;…
Easter Island and the Allure of “Lost Civilizations”
She also formed a bond with a Rapanui prophetess named Angata, the leader of an uprising against the sheep-ranching operation then dominating the island, which took place during the…
When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City…
The Cold Comfort of a Helene Schjerfbeck Painting
In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of…
The New York Shooting That Defined an Era
“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed and his daughter raped by muggers and responds by…
How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a professor of philosophy and disability studies at…
Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to…
The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films
A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible…
The Psychology of Fashion
Virginia Woolf had portrayed a similar tension between unity and fragmentation a decade earlier, with Mrs. Dalloway gazing at herself in the mirror: That was her self—pointed; dartlike;…
The Top Twenty-five New Yorker Stories of 2025
Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the…
What if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction?
After feeding Han’s writing into GPT-4o, Chakrabarty fine-tuned fresh versions of the model on the work of twenty-nine other authors, including a close college friend of mine, Tony…
Stephen Sondheim, Puzzle Maestro
Most of the book, though, is devoted to a “ludological biography” of the great man: a life in puzzle pieces, hitherto unassembled. Sondheim may not have considered his puzzles and games to…
Memory Speaks in “Marjorie Prime” and “Anna Christie”
Helen Shaw reviews “Marjorie Prime,” with June Squibb, Cynthia Nixon, and Danny Burstein, Source link
The New Studio Museum in Harlem Shows that Black Art Matters
I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to break through that uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In my sister’s…
Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?
As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say…
Will Geese Redeem Noisy, Lawless Rock and Roll?
On a recent Friday night, the indie-rock band Geese—which formed in New York City in 2016, when its members were still a couple of years short of the legal driving age—played the final…
The New Studio Museum in Harlem Is a Landmark in the History of Black Art
I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to break through that uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In my sister’s…
And Your Little Dog, Too, by David Sedaris
“He just bit me!” I said. The woman stood upright and pushed her hair away from her face. She was pretty except for her mouth, which was thin-lipped and hard-looking. “Huh?” “Your dog just…
The High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner
Much like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was utterly devoted to the Party’s ideals, but she also had a keen eye for…