In Defense of Despair
The Joke I tell that no one laughs at goes like this: I picked a pretty rough time to actually want to be alive; in retrospect, back when I wanted to die, things were not actually all that…
Section
World
Hilton Als on the Visionary World of Alva Rogers
I met Alva Rogers years ago, through a mutual friend, and her various incarnations—actress, singer, artistic director, writer, puppeteer—have always been remarkable to me. As a young…
On “I’m the Problem,” Morgan Wallen Goes Back to God’s Country
Morgan Wallen is a country singer, almost defiantly so, though he is also popular on a scale that seems to circumvent genre entirely. Each of Wallen’s past two albums spent at least a…
Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single
One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although…
Robert Macfarlane on Books That Hold Water
The writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane has spent much of his life climbing up mountains and fishing on rivers, and his passion for each extends to his writing. Over the years, he has…
How Donald Trump’s Crypto Dealings Push the Bounds of Corruption
Imagine that someone in a position of great political power created a hundred billion raffle tickets and made them available for public purchase. If you buy the tickets, eventually you…
In “Jetty,” a Grand Infrastructure Project Becomes Both Visually and Politically Compelling
The algorithm has been feeding me industrial-strength A.S.M.R.: short videos of computer-controlled lathes, in extreme closeup, doing elaborate milling of wood or metal rods. Sam…
Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?
This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This…
Our Favorite “Only in New York” Spots
“Only in New York” may be a cliché, but only because it’s so true. For Goings On, in our New York-themed centenary issue, we asked staff writers to share some of their favorite spots that…
Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her students, “You don’t need a plot, but you do need a…
How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy
In 2002, the thirty-five-year-old, Luxembourg-born painter Michel Majerus was on a short flight from Berlin, where he lived, to his native country, when the plane crashed, killing him and…
On “Hacks” and “The Studio,” Hollywood Confronts Its Flop Era
For years now, Hollywood has been on a losing streak. In the film and television business, good news has been harder to come by than original stories, with the successive disruptions of…
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true,…
Why I Can’t Quit the New York Post
Worse, I’m not sure I want to. If I’m away and something big happens, I usually ask a friend if he can stop by a newsstand so I don’t miss the hard copy of a good front-page headline. If…
Keith McNally’s Guide to Making a Scene
McNally seemed to enjoy occupying a place in New York’s cultural landscape; he describes McInerney asking for permission to use the restaurant’s image and giving him a manuscript to read.…
“The Rehearsal” Finally Achieves Liftoff
The second season of “The Rehearsal” is instantly better than the first because it’s about something. In the show’s previous season, Nathan Fielder developed and applied his…
Bill Burr Does Not Want to Talk About Politics
Journalism is not standup comedy. We’re not in the same world. So what do you think your responsibility is? My responsibility is to make you laugh. And, if I’m being malicious, people…
My Brain Finally Broke
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the…
Disco Balls and Roller Skates, at Xanadu
In the lushly pleasurable Bobby Darin bio-musical “Just in Time,” by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, the director Alex Timbers ensconces his sweet-voiced star Jonathan Groff in a gleaming…
A Joyfully Chaotic Tribute to Pavement in “Pavements”
Rock documentaries and bio-pics have been parodied for nearly as long as they have existed, but there’s a reason for their ingrained absurdity that’s even weightier than fan service: music…
Rumaan Alam and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Female Protagonist
The writer Rumaan Alam has noticed that readers, especially as of late, can be quick to dismiss novels that have characters they find unpleasant. But “when a character on the page is able…
The Miscalculations of COVID School Closures
On June 26, 2020, three months after the coronavirus pandemic had seized the United States, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents about sixty-seven thousand pediatric…
Why Even Try if You Have A.I.?
A couple of years ago, my wife bought my then four-year-old son a supercool set of wooden ramps, which could be combined with our furniture to create courses through which little balls…
For Watchers of “The Clock,” Time Is Running Out
“The Clock,” the addictive film masterpiece by the Swiss artist Christian Marclay, has been showing continually at MOMA since November, and some of us have become transfixed Clockwatchers,…