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…
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The Idea That Reshaped Identity Politics Has a Complicated Backstory
Plenty of scholars and journalists have written histories of these contentious terms, “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” Now Crenshaw has written something different: a…
Why We Can’t Stop Reading—and Writing—Food Diaries
Spending a day in someone’s kitchen can tell us about their relationship to time, money, pleasure, and place. 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…
Pierre Huyghe’s A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin
In the far corner of the Halle, there’s a dim glow. Your job, you realize, is to grope your way toward that light, which reveals itself to be a projector beam hitting a colossal screen,…
The Perennial Predicament of the Artist with an Office Job
In “The Copywriter,” by Daniel Poppick, a poet searches for meaning in the grindset. Source link
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…
“An Ark” Imagines the Afterlife; “Data” Imagines a Corporate Hell
There will be future applications of “mixed reality,” I’m sure, and I hope they work with funkier material. Personally, I’d rather get clobbered by holographic McKellens than be told not…
Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness
“I really don’t feel that it’s all necessary anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. “And so what I try to bring into my music are just a very few essential things that I…
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…
What Makes a Good Mother?
It is only in the modern era that women’s own experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering begins to be widely recorded, and here, too, there is an omnipresent sense of the…
How to Recover from Caring Too Much
In Clayton’s and Josephson’s hands, though, the fawn response becomes something more pliable, less a sign of acute threat than a broadly anxious orientation to the world. “For some people,…
In Tracy Letts’s “Bug,” Crazy Is Contagious
In Cromer’s framing, that hollowness begins to feel like the play’s sad theme: when someone is on a desperate hunt for meaning, the source of it ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It…
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…
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…
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
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…
What Makes Goethe So Special?
On his return to Frankfurt, he found it: the life of Götz von Berlichingen, an early-sixteenth-century knight with a prosthetic iron hand, whose autobiography Goethe had stumbled upon in…
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…