Section
Style
Lessons of Later-in-Life Fatherhood
Forty-nine years ago, on what I recall as a Saturday morning when I was six and my father was fifty-six, I barged into the bathroom, as…
Barbra Streisand on “The Secret of Life”
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“Materialists” Is a Feast of Talking Pictures
Words are actions, as anyone who’s ever been told “I do” or “You’re fired” knows. Yet, after nearly a century of talking pictures, most…
Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?
Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages—with sixteenth-century folktales about…
Jean Smart and John Krasinski Go It Alone, on Broadway and Off
This has been the season of the star. For months now, possibly because the film and television industries spent 2024 in disarray, New York…
What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center Production of “Les Mis”
On Wednesday evening, when the new Czar of All the Arts, Donald Trump, went to see “Les Misérables”—which is, we are told, along with…
Sly Stone’s Political and Musical Awakening
In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider to be his masterwork, “What’s Going On?” A song cycle told from the point of view…
Katherine Rundell’s Fantastic Four
Katherine Rundell grew up reading about mythical creatures—Minotaurs and trolls, dragons and unicorns—in books by writers like J. R. R.…
Video Stores, Revival Houses, and the Future of Movies
With movie adaptations of books, the essential virtue is audacity, the readiness to transform the source material. That’s equally true of…
“Materialists” Is a Thoughtful Romantic Drama That Doesn’t Quite Add Up
The work of the Korean Canadian filmmaker Celine Song is modest in scope and intimate in feel, but listen closely to her words—to say…
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…
The Wizard Behind Hollywood’s Golden Age
How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and…
What’s a Neighborhood Restaurant Without a Neighborhood?
Industry City, an enormous waterfront complex in Sunset Park, has in recent years reinvented itself as a hub for small businesses and tech…
Why Do Doctors Write?
The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical…
What We’re Reading This Summer: Mega-Reads
Unlike Peter Thiel and Giorgia Meloni, I did not grow up with “The Lord of the Rings” in my life, and, reading it now with my son, it’s…
The Sixties Come Back to Life in “Everything Is Now.”
The film critic and cultural historian J. Hoberman’s new book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings,…
Sarah Ruhl’s Guides in Life and Art
In the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s new book, “Lessons from My Teachers,” she writes of a period in her life when she—by then a celebrated…
Alison Bechdel and the Search for the Beginner’s Mind
One weekend in 1986, on a jaunt in a rented cabin with her soon-to-be-ex-lover, Alison Bechdel, a virtually unknown cartoonist in her…
How the Broadway Musical “Maybe Happy Ending” Creates Visual Magic
The scenic designer Dane Laffrey on the inspiration he found while travelling in Tokyo and the ideas that led to the groundbreaking set…
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…
David Hockney’s “Going Up Garrowby Hill”
There are many ways to celebrate spring, but few contemporary artists have devoted more attention to the topic than David Hockney. The…
Jarvis Cocker Is Out of the Rain
This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s…
Sebastião Salgado’s View of Humanity
Last year, on the occasion of Taschen’s reissue of “Workers” (originally published in 1993), I had the chance to interview Salgado over…