Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
Sensing that she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away from him. “If you weren’t so old,” she said, according…
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World
January Festivals Bring the Weird, Wonderful Shows
Also: “Tartuffe” mania, the guitar stylings of William Tyler and Yasmin Williams, Justin Chang’s movies for a new year, and more. Source link
Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful
No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be. Did we anticipate…
Natalia Lafourcade Reimagines Mexican Folk Music
After the incident, she needed reconstructive surgery, and had brain inflammation so severe that when she tried to look up, all she saw was black. Even once she was well enough to leave…
The Weirdly Refreshing Honesty of the Oscars of TikTok
For the longest time, I kept myself from joining TikTok. Social media, I figured, was already kind of a problem for me. I was heavily hooked on Instagram, reaching for my phone and…
Thelma Golden on the Literature of Harlem
When the Studio Museum in Harlem opened, in 1986, it occupied a rented loft. Last month, it reopened, after a seven-year hiatus—this time, in a handsome structure of dark concrete and…
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“Father Mother Sister Brother” Explores the Mysteries of Family Life
This is what happens when “The Dead Don’t Die” dies. That scintillating Jim Jarmusch movie, from 2019, a mashup of comedy, science fiction, horror, and apocalyptic rage amid brazen…
Lorenzo Mattotti’s “Goodbye to All That”
For the cover of the December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026, issue, the artist Lorenzo Mattotti depicted a time-honored way to shake off the old and welcome the New Year. “I love drawing…
The Psychology of Fashion
Virginia Woolf had portrayed a similar tension between unity and fragmentation a decade earlier, with Mrs. Dalloway gazing at herself in the mirror: That was her self—pointed; dartlike;…
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
The Extremely Online Bona Fides of “I Love L.A.”
In Sunday’s season finale of “I Love L.A.,” Los Angeles is blamed for getting between the show’s protagonist, Maia (Rachel Sennott), and her live-in boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson).…
The Wild, Sad Life of John Cage’s First Lover
Why not New York? Personal factors may have been at work: in L.A., Cage’s parents could provide support. But L.A. was also coming into its own as a cultural center. The Austrian-born…
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Tyler Mitchell’s Art-Historical Mood Board
Visually, Mitchell’s images are sumptuous, stylish, and seductive, channelling the old-school photographic glamour epitomized by Richard Avedon, one of Mitchell’s idols. Conceptually,…
Jim Jarmusch’s Ironically Optimistic Family Movie
Also: Graciela Iturbide’s tranquil photographs of Mexico, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in “Song Sung Blue,” the coke-rap of Clipse, and more. Source link
“Marty Supreme” ’s Megawatt Personality
Josh Safdie’s hectic new film “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, mainly in New York, is, essentially, “Uncut Gems” but with a happy ending. That recklessly exuberant 2019 drama, which Safdie…
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A Year of Listening Beyond the Algorithm
My habit of seeking out new music began with a few strokes of good luck. I grew up in a college town in the early to mid-nineties, during one of the golden eras of college radio. I spent a…
The Delirious Cinematic Artifice of Bi Gan’s “Resurrection”
In the Chinese director’s third feature, the pop idol Jackson Yee plays a shape-shifting dreamer who gets lost in a densely allusive maze of stories and genres. 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…
What to Read Before Your Trip to Atropia
“Pastoralia,” the title story in this collection, is about two people who work in a theme park, pretending to be cavemen. Like in “Atropia,” the main character is completely obsessed with…
Rob Reiner Made a New Kind of Fairy Tale
On Sunday, when it was reported that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been stabbed to death at their home in Los Angeles, the news seemed so senseless and…
Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?
In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread…
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” Mostly Treads Water
Got all that? Good. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is many things: a lengthy demo reel for the latest sophistications in performance-capture technology, for which we can credit the ever more…
The Best Performances of 2025
Emma Stone, “Bugonia” Stone was on my list in 2023, the year she gave two discomfiting comic performances, in the Showtime series “The Curse” and in the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor…
Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food
The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of…