World
A Young Girl Questions Wearing a Head Scarf in “Rizoo”
When the filmmaker Azadeh Navai was five years old, her mother took her to have her photo taken for an I.D. And, before she knew it, a scarf was...
The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic
No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In the right light, the social network for professionals is a lavish...
Kadir Nelson’s “Messenger”
For the cover of the February 3, 2025, issue, the artist Kadir Nelson captured the emotion he experienced when, walking downtown, he startled a flock of pigeons. “I felt...
Catherine Breillat’s Unsettling Cinema of Desire
In the French director Catherine Breillat’s film “Fat Girl,” from 2001, two adolescent sisters go on summer holiday with their parents near the seaside. The older sister, Elena, is...
The Player’s the Thing in “Grand Theft Hamlet”
In an 1818 lecture, on the subject of “Hamlet,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:Persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something...
What We See in Lauren Sanchez’s Cleavage
Remember a few years back when boobs were declared over? The data points supporting this claim were tenuous but nonetheless of some note. There was the Pornhub study from...
Liza Minnelli’s Desire to Touch
The avant-garde company Heartbeat Opera is engaging in another innovative game of source-text telephone, this time with a new iteration of “Salome.” The original draws from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous...
The Real-Life Drama of “Dying”
In observational documentaries, one important thing tends to be left unspoken: namely, why the films’ subjects let filmmakers embed in their lives. Without knowing what kind of visibility and...
The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
Between 1848 and 1852, more than twenty thousand Chinese migrants made their way to San Francisco in search of gold. The vast majority were men—rural peasants from Guangdong Province,...
Imani Perry on Experimental Histories of Black Life
Imani Perry teaches at Harvard and is the author of “South to America,” a genre-mixing exploration of the American South, and, most recently, “Black in Blues,” a critical appraisal...
