Pete Hegseth, in the Tank
The defensive Secretary of War. Source link
Section
World
Samuel Beckett on the Couch
Bion, who was born in 1897, in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, moved to England for boarding school at age eight. After fighting for the British in the…
“Train Dreams” Is Too Tidy to Go Off the Rails
In Clint Bentley’s adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella, Joel Edgerton plays a builder of bridges who finds himself increasingly cut off from the modern world. Source link
Does Olivia Nuzzi Make Good Copy?
In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it is a book about life in…
The High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner
Much like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was utterly devoted to the Party’s ideals, but she also had a keen eye for…
The Best Albums of 2025
Looking back at the songs I played the most in 2025, I can sense my own hunger for music that felt wounded, carnal, unfamiliar, tactile, and askew—far from the uncanny sheen of A.I., far…
“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation.…
Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” his 1966 Shakespearian meta-theatrical puzzle, about tertiary characters grappling with their inexorable fate, mainstreamed conversations about…
How the Ceramicist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye Makes Bowls That Hold Time
Each pot takes six to seven hours to build, with coils that she flattens into thick bands. She starts a new series by drawing the forms she has in mind, though the actual shape always…
A Holiday Gift Guide: Presents for Music Lovers
It’s easy to think of music as ephemeral and essentially free, rather than a thing you can dotingly select, acquire, and present to your nearest and dearest. Yet music is a courageous and…
Louis C.K.’s Next Chapter
These days, C.K. occupies a strange place in the culture. He is in a cancellation limbo, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. C.K. isn’t too cancelled to perform several…
The Best Jokes of 2025
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin and…
A Chef’s Guide to Sumptuous Writing
From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New Yorker noted in a…
Sam Shepard’s Enactments of Manhood
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his rangy teen-age…
“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life
Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides…
A Family Drama Over Gender in “Holy Curse”
“Holy Curse,” a new short from the U.S.-based Indian filmmaker Snigdha Kapoor, is punctuated by two instances of roadside urination. “I’ve done that so many times,” Kapoor told me,…
The Best Part of Thanksgiving, Bones and All
Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology. Every other event on our civic calendar asks us to remember something noble, or…
Where Dante Guides Us
Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside…
Malika Favre’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For the first cover of the December 1, 2025, special centenary issue titled “Our Far-Flung Correspondents,” the artist Malika Favre created “Taking Flight,” the latest adaptation of The…
I’m Donut ? and the Allure of the International Chain
I’m Donut ?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty…
The Obliging Apocalypse of “Pluribus”
The new sci-fi drama from Vince Gilligan posits an end-of-humanity scenario that everyone other than its protagonist can agree on. Source link
Alice Austen’s Larky Life
Austen’s trajectory, like that of many artists in New York, finally hinged on the vicissitudes of real estate. At Clear Comfort, she built an existence of remarkable self-determination—for…
Does MAGA Have Ideas?
Political life is inevitably disappointing, because all political movements contain contradictions. Democrats consider themselves advocates of the working class, yet their party skews…
“Two People Exchanging Saliva” Rewrites the Slap in Cinema
One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What…