Style

Great Gay Novels Recommended by the Director of “The History of Sound”
In Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “The History of Sound,” two young men at the New England Conservatory of Music meet in a bar, when one of them (Josh O’Connor)...

How Samin Nosrat Learned to Love the Recipe
“I was losing my mind,” the chef and writer Samin Nosrat said. We were sitting in the living room of her small house in Oakland, and she was describing...

Can You Really Live One Day at a Time?
This summer, I reread the novel “Aurora,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer whom I profiled a few years ago. Robinson has an ecological orientation, and “Aurora” is...

Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican Homecoming
In 2016, a sinuous remix of a track called “Diles” began pulsing its way through streaming services and night clubs. It featured a handful of Puerto Rican performers, but...

How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown...

Maira Kalman’s “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl”
The artist Maira Kalman has always had an idiosyncratic approach to defining elegance, having co-authored a book titled “(un)Fashion,” and illustrated E. B. White’s “The Elements of Style.” For...

In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home
That’s meant to be remedied by Calder Gardens, a new institution taking shape in a half-buried berm on the Parkway, not far from that paternal fountain. The site joins...

A Tiny Cambodian Spot Packs an Outsized Punch
Bong (the name comes from a Khmer term of kinship and respect) is run by the Cambodian chef Chakriya Un, who was born in a Thai refugee camp and...

What I Wanted, What I Got
The popular girl at my elementary school—let’s call her Denise—was not blond like Barbie but pretty in a conventional manner I envied. She had brown hair, skin that tanned...