Style
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” Isn’t a Feel-Good New York Story
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen. Many readers addressed their fan letters not to...
Refinding James Baldwin
The text that weighed on him at the time of his arrival to Turkey was his novel “Another Country,” then unfinished. The turbulence of civil-rights America, too. Baldwin is...
The Unstoppable Rise of the State Symbol
If your New Year’s resolution is to stop obsessively reading post-election analyses, then perhaps you would welcome another way of understanding these United States. What do Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,...
In Big Star’s “Radio City,” the Old Spells Don’t Work
In the early months of 1973, the band that dared to call itself Big Star was anything but. The album of glittering, tightly orchestrated guitar rock they had released...
The Weird New Normal of Donald Trump in 2024
On Christmas Day, Donald Trump issued his traditional holiday greeting. Posting on Truth Social, the social-media site created to serve as a platform for both his personal enrichment and...
The Year in Surprises
December’s so dramatic. For weeks, the days darken—a quickening fade that suggests a coming show. It’s depressing to leave home around four-thirty and realize the sun’s already set. But...
What We’re Reading to Start the New Year
The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also made their way...
The New “Nosferatu” Drains the Life from Its Predecessor
Robert Eggers’s remake of the German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic, “Nosferatu,” may be presumptuous, but it’s not cynical. Murnau’s film, a silent, is an adaptation of...
Does Morality Do Us Any Good?
Sauer, who cautions that his chronological arrangements “shouldn’t be taken too literally,” terms the results of his multidisciplinary triangulation a “deep history,” one that “doesn’t use dates or names,...
Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
Like countless other people around the globe, I stream music, and like more than six hundred million of them I mainly use Spotify. Streaming currently accounts for about eighty...
