Style
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...
Tim Robinson Finds Humanity—and Tests It—in “The Chair Company”
In this outline, “The Chair Company” could be a sketch premise: “guy loses it after embarrassing himself at a big meeting.” This was the problem that bedevilled “Friendship,” an...
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 probability and droll ennui (“Life is a gamble,...
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...
How Noah Baumbach Fell (Back) in Love with the Movies
It was somewhere on a deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 A.M., with a rain machine, while I was shooting “White Noise.” I think I felt, Oh God,...
The Offices Only a Newsperson Could Love
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your Meadowlands,...
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...
My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine
My cat, Harriet, is curled up on the TV console when I walk into the living room. She blinks at me, slowly. Cats blinking at you is supposed to...
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...
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...
