Style
A Pioneering Photographer Revives Her Slide Show of Lesbian Life
For several years, starting in 1979, the photographer Joan E. Biren, or JEB, travelled around presenting a slide show that she’d spent years building. “I started touring at a...
“Prince Faggot” Sends Up Kink and Country
On a blue-lit stage, a naked man—blindfolded, trussed, and gagged—hangs like a deer from a pole. Pale and gleaming, he looks like a painting of St. Sebastian, rapturous in...
A Summer Reading List of Lighthearted Mysteries
For many readers, summer is the time for breezy, undemanding books—the kind you can toss in a beach bag and finish before the sunburn sets in. Sue Halpern, a...
The Shrewdly Regenerative Apocalypse of “28 Years Later”
Perhaps because cannibalism comes with the territory, the zombie movie has proved uncommonly immune to a certain strain of critical attack: the kind that instinctively finds fault with the...
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts
In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style...
Glory and Gore in “Afternoons of Solitude”
You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. Full disclosure: I...
“The Gilded Age” Is a Poor Man’s Period Drama
In the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” the characters are keenly aware that they live in interesting times. Early in the series, which is set in the eighteen-eighties, an...
Ben Shahn, the Lefty Artist Who Was Left Behind
From the late nineteen-forties through the mid-fifties, Ben Shahn was one of the most in-demand artists in America. Whether you were mailing a package at a post office, flipping...
Are Young People Having Enough Sex?
The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a...
