“The Grass at Airports,” by Fabio Morábito
This is the fourth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here. I’m part of the crew that takes care of the…
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Coldplaygate Is a Reminder That There’s No Escaping Going Viral
It doesn’t take a surreptitious phone camera to get caught in a viral video. Smartphones have cast a decentralized web of surveillance over the world, with bystanders ready to document and…
Women Playwrights Lose the Limelight
In the late days of June, as the old theatre season was ebbing away and new-season announcements were rolling in, a shock hit New York. Playwrights Horizons, the birthplace of shows…
The Sleazy, Unsettling Sounds of Mk.gee
Earlier this summer, the singer and guitarist Mk.gee played two sold-out shows at the Stone Pony, a rock club just off the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The venue, which opened in…
Next-Level Vietnamese at Bánh Anh Em
As always with great new restaurants these days, getting a table is a bit of an investment, though Bánh Anh Em takes the fundamentally democratic approach of allowing no reservations at…
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenway
I have a recurring dream about my father and me, one of the few welcome dreams I have about him. We’re both in our late thirties, though he’s fitter than I remember him ever being. We’re…
“Eddington” Is a Lethally Self-Satisfied COVID Satire
“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier…
“Double Time for Pat Hobby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is the third story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here. “Double Time for Pat Hobby” was filed in the…
Rachel Kushner’s Advice to Writers
The novelist Rachel Kushner recently taught a class at Stanford that concerned, as the course catalogue advertised it, “the sacred art of stealing from the world.” All four of Kushner’s…
Justin Bieber’s Messy, Improbable Masterpiece
In the course of Justin Bieber’s nearly twenty-year career, his music has come to be somewhat immaterial to his celebrity. For many, he is an almost Kardashian-like figure, whose songs are…
A New Agnès Varda Exhibition Is an Extension of Her Life’s Work
When Varda shot portraits on location, her practice was both observational and interventionist. She took subjects around town in her car in search of suitably photogenic sites and then…
How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity
About those faraway realms: Can we really credit two white Victorians, and their peculiarly German fetish for classification, with the invention of homosexuality? Anticipating this…
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you…
A Memoir of Working-Class Britain Wrings Playfulness from Pain
The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged…
What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?
If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition.…
Earth’s Poet of Scale
If there was one absence in Burtynsky’s account of our time, however, it was the single greatest result of all that mining, burning, and consuming: the transformation of the atmosphere.…
What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?
In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin, “Wild Thing,” is the first to appear in English in…
Conor McPherson’s Reliable Treasure
Conor McPherson’s small 1997 masterwork “The Weir” has been one of the most reliable treasures of the Irish Repertory Theatre. First directed by Ciarán O’Reilly in 2013, revived in 2015,…
Package Tracking Takes a Dark Turn in “Paper Towels”
When an online order goes missing, employees are often blamed. But how should they be punished? Now premium users get to decide. Source link
“Hot Spot,” by Nora Lange
He called. She answered. He was her only sibling. He’d paid to have someone deliver her citrus so that she could avoid scurvy. Source link
The Simplistic Moral Lessons of “Superman”
The world may be going to hell, but the writer and director James Gunn has graced it with a sunshine “Superman.” The most recent installments in the franchise—Zack Snyder’s diptych “Man of…
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“A Marriage at Sea” Is a Study of Couplehood in Extremis
“To have chosen such a life, as opposed to having been drugged or crimped or hoaxed aboard, was almost defiant in its sense of alienation,” Geoffrey Wolff writes in his biography of Joshua…
A Quietly Subversive Novel About Renewal on the Italian Riviera
Recognizing oneself as one really is and not as one appears to others is the major theme of Elizabeth von Arnim’s work. Von Arnim, an Australian brought up in England, married her first…