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Helen Oyeyemi’s Novel of Cognitive Dissonance
Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we’re twitchy with regret and self-loathing,…
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Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?
Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century…
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A Season of Unease at the Edinburgh Festival
For a few weeks each August, the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe fill every theatre, student center,…
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The Fiery Mania of Dijon’s “Baby”
Dijon Duenas has one of those voices that’s meant for televised singing competitions and gospel choirs, swooning ballads and achy slow…
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“Highest 2 Lowest” Marks a Conservative Pivot for Spike Lee
It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford…
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Fall Culture Preview
Few have captured infatuation like Schubert, three of whose lovelorn song cycles—“Die Schöne Müllerin,” “Winterreise,” and…
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“My Undesirable Friends: Part I” Is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent
Because the Russian alphabet has no direct equivalent of the letter “H,” speakers often substitute a “G” sound; “Harry Potter” thus…
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Roman Polanski’s Self-Centered “An Officer and a Spy”
The prime parallel between the movie “An Officer and a Spy” and the life of its director, Roman Polanski, is obvious but inexact. The…
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“An Open Heart,” by Jamil Jan Kochai
This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years,…
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss
When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him…
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Coming of Age in Panic Mode
The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his…
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The Revenge of Millennial Cringe
In the summer of 2009, a shambolic Los Angeles band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros released a single titled “Home.” A…
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What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around…
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How the Bonds Among Virtual-Reality Furries Saved a Life, in “The Reality of Hope”
Watch “The Reality of Hope.” Anyone who doubts the validity of relationships that take place only through a digital medium has never…
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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…
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The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could…
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Ethel Cain’s Anti-Pop Stardom
Midway through the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the…
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The Futility of Simulating Nature
In “The Anthropocene of Illusion,” the photographer Zed Nelson captures how the natural world has been reproduced, reshuffled, and…
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Our Age of Zombie Culture
It’s not alive, but it’s not dead, either. It consumes a vast amount of resources. It’s mindless: what presents as its will is really a…
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Richard Brody’s Summertime Movie Picks
The recent heat wave may be only a memory—but enshrining memories is what movies do, and many of them rely on harsh summer climates as…
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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…
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A Brooklyn Renter’s Odyssey
Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall cowboy-boot-shaped building, with an…
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What Happens to Public Media Now?
When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he remarked that…