Adebunmi Gbadebo and the Mysteries of Clay
The relationship between Adebunmi Gbadebo and her material, clay, is one of supplication—on the part of Gbadebo. The churched among us consider a potter something of an autocrat; they find…
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World
“The Smashing Machine” Pulls Its Punches
Only two kinds of actors are bad: those who can’t be themselves and those who you wish wouldn’t be. All the rest are likely to shine in movies by good directors, and most actors whose…
Should College Get Harder?
Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat around a long…
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…
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Chris Kraus Reinvents the True-Crime Novel
On a recent Sunday morning, I took a bus to Williamsburg to meet Chris Kraus, the seventy-year-old writer who attained permanent literary It Girl status with her début novel, “I Love…
The Leftist Podcaster Who Studies Online Radicalization
This past March, the Times writer and power podcaster Ezra Klein appeared on “Doomscroll,” a small but influential YouTube interview show hosted by the thirty-eight-year-old artist,…
What Catherine Leroy’s Fearless Photographs Reveal About the Vietnam War
Accusations of fakery in combat photography go back at least to Mathew Brady’s pictures of Civil War battlefields. Brady’s troop of photographers appear to have sometimes moved corpses to…
“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…
The Uneasy Prophecies of Cate Le Bon
There’s a scene in Netflix’s “Too Much” in which the heroine, an American transplant in London, listens to a playlist curated by her new British paramour. (Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe…
A Children’s Book That Actually Feels Like Childhood
One of the perks of parenthood, it is often said, is to relive the joys of one’s youth, to share with your child everything you once loved—especially books. Before I was a parent, I was…
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” Is a Film for the Ages
The Harlem Renaissance—the subject that everyone had gathered to discuss—is described in the film by Major as the first time that Black people were recognized as creative people; by…
We’re Still Living in Man Ray’s Shadow
The Met’s stress on quartz gun and fern—that is, on the rayographs—is a welcome departure from Man Ray’s familiar cast of naked and famous people. His first batch, “Champs délicieux”…
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…
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,…
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,…
The Four Horsemen Team Rides Again
As at Four Horsemen, where an oeuf mayonnaise is zebra-striped with squid ink and humble beans are treated like precious gems, Curtola trusts his diners to venture beyond obvious…
The Strange, Cinematic Life of Charlie Sheen
“I think there’s so many stories and images ingrained in people’s minds about the concept of me,” the actor Charlie Sheen tells the camera in the new two-part Netflix documentary about his…
How Donald Trump’s Culture-Wars Playbook Felled Jimmy Kimmel
On Wednesday, bowing to pressure from the Trump Administration, ABC pulled the late-night series “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air. The show, which had run for more than two decades, was…
Raul Lopez Wants to Be American Fashion
In the fall of 2014, Lopez staged an official Fashion Week event at Webster Hall. He recalled thinking, I’m about to hit it, I’m about to make it now—until he realized that he wouldn’t…
Barry Blitt’s “Remote Control”
For the cover of the September 29, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Barry Blitt attempted to capture, in one image, Donald Trump’s unprecedented series of attacks on the media, destruction of…
How Samin Nosrat Learned to Love the Recipe
“I was losing my mind,” the chef and writer Samin Nosrat said. We were sitting in the living room of her small house in Oakland, and she was describing a period in her life, just after the…
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…
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…
A Tiny Cambodian Spot Packs an Outsized Punch
Bong (the name comes from a Khmer term of kinship and respect) is run by the Cambodian chef Chakriya Un, who was born in a Thai refugee camp and grew up in the U.S., and her partner,…