Style
When the Man Tried to Sell Minimalism to the Counterculture
“The Man can’t bust our music,” an advertisement in the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb proclaimed, in November, 1968. The accompanying image showed seven presumed radicals huddled in a jail...
“Eden” Is a Desert-Island Thriller That Despoils Itself
The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron Howard, a director whose cinematic disposition can...
What The New Yorker Was Watching in 1925
Film criticism at The New Yorker started with a bang: the first movie reviewed in the first issue, dated February 21, 1925, was the German director F. W. Murnau’s...
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had...
The Celebrity Picture Book Boom
There are no guilty pleasures in childhood. It is only as an adult that I feel a certain sheepishness when recalling one of my favorite picture books, “Ann Likes...
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were...
Cindy Sherman’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8,...
New York City, Taco Town
Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a...
The Creator of “Subway Takes” One Hundred Per Cent Disagrees
“Subway Takes” is the TikTok version of the “Tonight Show”: wholesome, relatable comedy, even if some episodes do acknowledge the existence of opioids and dick pics. The premise is...
The High Femme Dystopia of Star Amerasu
If the recent embrace of seemingly—and only seemingly—autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in “The Matrix” awaits us. During the 1999 film’s...
