Our Age of Zombie Culture
It’s not alive, but it’s not dead, either. It consumes a vast amount of resources. It’s mindless: what presents as its will is really a drift toward the mean, toward the unconsciousness of…
Section
World
Nobody Wins on “Surrounded”
A couple of weeks ago, a clip from a YouTube video titled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives” started circulating on social media. In it, the British-American journalist Mehdi…
“Weapons,” “Harvest,” and the Shackles of the Horror Genre
Horror is an accursed genre. Because it promises to deliver a specific sensational effect, its stories are obliged to fit into preordained patterns. Its popularity depends on…
A Brooklyn Renter’s Odyssey
Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall cowboy-boot-shaped building, with an industrial-grade kitchen and deteriorating bistro…
What Happens to Public Media Now?
When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he remarked that broadcasting is built on a collection of…
André Aciman on Reading—and Misreading—Emotions
Each of the novellas that make up André Aciman’s new book, “Room on the Sea,” picks apart the intricacies of how people comprehend the feelings of others—or fail to. In this, they share…
King Princess’s Homecoming
After the Civil War, the German-born Jewish businessman Isidor Straus moved with his family to New York City. Straus was enterprising and handsome, with small round spectacles, an angular…
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had backed a coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, the…
How the Poet James Schuyler Wrung Sense from Sensibility
The American poet James Schuyler composed his first significant poem during a nine-week stay at the Payne Whitney Westchester psychiatric clinic, in White Plains, New York, in late 1951.…
Three Plays on the Pancake
Pancake Soufflé at Pitt’s It’s arguable that this dish, the flagship dessert at chef Jeremy Salamon’s proudly kitschy Red Hook restaurant, isn’t actually a pancake: no pan, no cake. But it…
The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans
Two American blondes have recently hawked denim. Beyoncé, an ambassador for Levi’s, dressed in outlaw drag, arrives at a semi-deserted laundromat. She slinks out of her 501s, revealing her…
Watching the “King of the Hill” Revival from Texas
I came to “King of the Hill” late, during the COVID pandemic. The animated hit co-created by Mike Judge ran for thirteen seasons starting in the late nineties. I’d avoided it then, largely…
The Ambitious Film Deconstructions of Stan Douglas
The enterprising Tiler Peck has been a leading dancer at New York City Ballet for more than fifteen years, played a neurotic ballerina on Amy Sherman-Palladino’s “Étoile,” and created a…
Getting in Marc Maron’s Head
In its nearly sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015,…
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Chiaroscuro at the Met”
For the cover of the August 4, 2025, issue, the artist Victoria Tentler-Krylov depicted the scene in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a typical summer day. “The Met can be an…
Life Inside a Singular Artists’ Enclave in Brooklyn, in “The Candy Factory”
Watch “The Candy Factory.” Some forty years ago, Ann Ballentine, a real-estate agent with an eccentric sense of style and a knack for fostering community, bought a building in the Clinton…
What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap
His reluctance to treat family structure as a causal factor is similarly puzzling. He notes that married Black households have an average wealth of two hundred and thirty thousand…
Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the Lessons of Theo Huxtable
A few hours after the news of Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s death began to spread, one of my closest friends called me. I knew before I picked up that he wanted to talk about Warner. We…
Notes on Bed Rest
Early in my first pregnancy, about three years ago, I did a thing that a lot of pregnant women do. I picked up my phone and scrolled through videos of pregnant women doing cool things. In…
“South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President
There’s a legal strategy known as the small-penis rule, wherein an author who writes a character based on a real person can potentially evade a libel suit by giving said character a small…
Summer Is the Time for Off Broadway Comedy
When the political activist, comedian, and performance artist Morgan Bassichis premièred their exquisitely funny show “Can I Be Frank?” in New York last summer, they were already picturing…
The Semi-Fictional Book That Transformed the Culinary World
It was early in 1985, during the first warm, blossoming weeks of spring in San Francisco, when I became hellbent on getting my old job back. Until the previous fall, I had been a cook at…
Sniffies Translates Cruising for the Digital Age
In the literature about cruising from the late twentieth century, what stands out is the physical choreography of it. David Wojnarowicz, in his 1991 memoir, “Close to the Knives,”…