Culture
Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America
As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one of its subplots, about the Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcycle circuit…
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News
Yasmina Reza’s “Art” Feeds Our Appetite for Argument as Entertainment
Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as…
News
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…
News
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…
Business
The Return of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Masterpiece, “The Brothers Size”
At the beginning of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s poetic drama “The Brothers Size,” now at the Shed, one of the play’s three actors pours white…
News
Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor
In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It…
News
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed…
News
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The…
News
Why Hasn’t Medical Science Cured Chronic Headaches?
Two decades ago, I was leaving my morning clinic at the hospital where I work when I suddenly felt an excruciating pain in my head. It was…
News
Hollywood’s Conservative Pivot
“King of the Hill,” the animated sitcom that first ran for thirteen Americana-powered seasons between 1997 and 2010, had a deceptively…
News
Sterling K. Brown’s Upstanding Archetype
There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when…
News
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…
News
L.A.’s Food Culture, Transformed by Immigration Raids
In early July, while shopping at a farmers’ market on the east side of Los Angeles, where I live, I bought a few packages of raw chicken…
News
The First Time America Went Beard Crazy
A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of…
Politics
What Will Become of the C.I.A.?
In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on…
Culture
Ryan Davis’s Junk-Drawer Heart
On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a…
News
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver…
News
What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?
In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin,…
News
“Too Much” Remixes the Rom-Com
Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for…
News
Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs.…
News
Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
“Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while…
News
The Portland Bar That Screens Only Women’s Sports
When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball…
News
What Did the Pop Culture of the Two-Thousands Do to Millennial Women?
“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest and most ambitious in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of…
News
What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime
Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell…