World
How the Ceramicist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye Makes Bowls That Hold Time
Each pot takes six to seven hours to build, with coils that she flattens into thick bands. She starts a new series by drawing the forms she has in...
A Holiday Gift Guide: Presents for Music Lovers
It’s easy to think of music as ephemeral and essentially free, rather than a thing you can dotingly select, acquire, and present to your nearest and dearest. Yet music...
Louis C.K.’s Next Chapter
These days, C.K. occupies a strange place in the culture. He is in a cancellation limbo, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. C.K. isn’t too...
The Best Jokes of 2025
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank...
A Chef’s Guide to Sumptuous Writing
From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New...
Sam Shepard’s Enactments of Manhood
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his...
“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life
Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police,...
A Family Drama Over Gender in “Holy Curse”
“Holy Curse,” a new short from the U.S.-based Indian filmmaker Snigdha Kapoor, is punctuated by two instances of roadside urination. “I’ve done that so many times,” Kapoor told me,...
The Best Part of Thanksgiving, Bones and All
Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology. Every other event on our civic calendar asks us to remember something...
Where Dante Guides Us
Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside down into...
