World
Now Watch Me Read
Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces...
The High-Born Rebel Who Took Up the Cause of the Commoner
Much like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was utterly devoted to the Party’s ideals, but she also had a keen...
The Best Albums of 2025
Looking back at the songs I played the most in 2025, I can sense my own hunger for music that felt wounded, carnal, unfamiliar, tactile, and askew—far from the...
“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a...
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...
