Style
How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire
Satire, George S. Kaufman famously said, is what closes on Saturday night. Meaning, of course, that it has a limited run because of its intrinsically circumscribed interest. To this,...
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Chiaroscuro at the Met”
For the cover of the August 4, 2025, issue, the artist Victoria Tentler-Krylov depicted the scene in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a typical summer day....
Life Inside a Singular Artists’ Enclave in Brooklyn, in “The Candy Factory”
Watch “The Candy Factory.” Some forty years ago, Ann Ballentine, a real-estate agent with an eccentric sense of style and a knack for fostering community, bought a building in...
Was the Renaissance Real?
Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and imperialism can’t explain it; they’re as...
A Young Parisian Chef’s Nouvelle Stodginess
I wanted more from Le Chêne, and from Duchêne. Not just more salt but more daring, more challenge, more bold and experimental vulgarity. Her crab thermidor (like many of...
Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the Lessons of Theo Huxtable
A few hours after the news of Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s death began to spread, one of my closest friends called me. I knew before I picked up that he wanted...
Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies
Nowadays, a secondhand, first-edition copy can sell for hundreds of dollars; in August, the book will be reissued by D.A.P. as “Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms” in an...
Notes on Bed Rest
Early in my first pregnancy, about three years ago, I did a thing that a lot of pregnant women do. I picked up my phone and scrolled through videos...
A Sensualist’s History of Gay Marriage and Immigration
There is a profuse longing for the foreseen. At least since the pandemic, I have seen some version of the statement “I could really use some precedented times.” The...
“South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President
There’s a legal strategy known as the small-penis rule, wherein an author who writes a character based on a real person can potentially evade a libel suit by giving...
