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…
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Harriet Clark’s Début Is a New Kind of Coming-of-Age Novel
Now a third joins their company, Harriet Clark’s superb first novel, “The Hill” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City.…
The Race to Give Every Child a Toy
Actually, they did want to be. There is a reason Morris Michtom moved his family from the Lower East Side to the row houses of Brooklyn as soon as he could. (When his youngest son was…
“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
How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News
St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in…
“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;…
How to Kill a Fish
A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being…
It Takes Only Five Paintings to See Helen Frankenthaler’s Genius
In a small show at MOMA, Frankenthaler seems to make paint its own living force, untouched by an artist. Source link
Matthew Broderick Stars as the Titular Grifter in “Tartuffe”
Cross and Broderick here offer studies in otiose passivity. Each gets big laughs from portraying inertia: their performances abound in side-eyed glances and awkward pauses followed by “So…
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…
The Ancient Roots of Doing Time
Tales of ancient incarceration, which might once have seemed the stuff of legend, turn out, again and again, to have an archeological foundation. Plutarch, the first-century Greek…
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…
A New Afghan Bakery, in New York’s Golden Age of Bread
As the city’s bakeries have grown increasingly culturally specific, representing far-flung cuisines and styles—see Librae, in the East Village, which deploys Danish techniques and Middle…
Kristin Chenoweth’s Uneven Gilt Trip in “The Queen of Versailles”
There’s a clarity to the arc of Greenfield’s documentary: first the pride goeth, then a fall teacheth. It’s a shame that the musical gets bogged down by what happened after that. In the…
The Comic Genius Who Pushed Television Further Than It Could Go
At its peak, “Your Show of Shows” had twenty-five million viewers, and Caesar was hailed as a genius. Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein were fans; on Saturday nights, when the show…
A Master of Fashion Photography Who Embraces Accidents
For Roversi, the studio is “like an empty stage, a space waiting to be filled, a time yet to be invented, where neither seasons, nor days, nor hours exist.” He is clearly caught up in the…
Jamar Roberts’s Second Act
Jamar Roberts is the choreographer of the moment. His dances are in demand, with commissions from ballet and modern-dance companies across the country, including two world premières this…
A Daring Show Remixes the Monuments of the Confederacy
The first thing you see is a horse’s ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man’s arm descends from the beast’s stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a…
Mark Bittman’s Experiment in Sliding-Scale Fine Dining
By dinnertime, the café had been convincingly transformed into a restaurant, with tea lights twinkling beside wildflower arrangements on exactingly set tables. The food came out slowly as…
What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?
Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some measure of her talent, or maybe of her moment,…
V. R. Lang, a Forgotten Queen Bee of Modern Poetry
Candidly. The past, the sensations of the past. Now! in cuneiform, of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs and onions of red syrup blended, of sand bejewelling the prepuce in tank…
Season 2 Update: Five Years Later
After nearly twenty-three years behind bars, Curtis Flowers was freed, in part due to In the Dark’s reporting. Now he’s back in Winona, Mississippi, where his saga began. What brought him…
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…
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…