A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met
John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a blistering wail of orchestral rage. Strings play a…
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Pan-African Dreams, Post-Colonial Realities
Two new books, on Kwame Nkrumah’s promise and Idi Amin’s tyranny, capture the soaring hopes and bitter aftermath of Africa’s age of independence. Source link
Why Does Taylor Swift Think She’s Cursed?
Since Taylor Swift launched the record-breaking Eras Tour, in 2023—a hundred and forty-nine dates, fifty-one cities, more than two billion dollars in ticket sales—she has been freakishly…
Man Ray’s Deadpan Wit on Display at the Met
“When Objects Dream,” the sensational Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 1), is centered on the artist’s refined experiments with the cameraless images he called…
“After the Hunt” Is a Pleasurably Ludicrous House of Cards
In Luca Guadagnino’s film, Julia Roberts plays a Yale professor forced to choose sides when a student accuses a colleague of sexual assault. Source link
Gertrude Stein’s Love Language
Stein’s authority as an arbiter was bolstered by an ambiguously gendered seduction. Genius, she believed, was a masculine trait, and she felt that her own genius was male. After she…
Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are…
“One Battle After Another” Is a Powerhouse of Tenderness and Fury
At a crucial moment in “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s electrifying new action thriller, someone cries out, “Who are you?!” A fair question. The man being asked is Bob…
Richard Brody’s New York Film Festival Picks
Sometimes names are misleading. Arabic numerals originated in India, Chinese checkers are German, white chocolate isn’t chocolate at all. The same does not hold for Pokito, a cozy dive in…
“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 Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith
If it were up to me, for example, I would very happily switch that rickety, always ill-fitting term “humanism” with something broader, more capacious. A bright, shiny neologism that would…
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…
Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery
At the start of “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s eighteenth novel, the year is 2119 and the humanities are still in crisis. Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030,…
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
Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America
As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one of its subplots, about the Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcycle circuit through the disputed territories of Central Europe,…
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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…
“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…
Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican Homecoming
In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called “Diles” began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but the main one was…
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…
In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home
That’s meant to be remedied by Calder Gardens, a new institution taking shape in a half-buried berm on the Parkway, not far from that paternal fountain. The site joins a civic row 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…
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 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…