Section
World
The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life
Some misunderstandings can be remedied by a simple explanation. Others end friendships or marriages. The most frightening…
The Cancer Scams That Foreshadowed MAHA
In 1986, Gilda Radner, one of “Saturday Night Live” ’s original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian…
How the Oscar Race Got as Messy as “Conclave”
Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A committee of august personages convenes, with much pomp and circumstance, to choose the best of their…
“The Fishing Place” Puts History Into the Present Tense
The best filmmakers, looking to the past, see the future. The Holocaust and the Nazi menace to Europe have been filmmakers’ mainstays for…
Fuchsia Dunlop’s Taste for Adventure
In the nineteen-nineties, Fuchsia Dunlop—now a celebrated food writer and expert in Chinese cooking—enrolled at the Sichuan Institute of…
FKA Twigs Leaves It All on the Dance Floor
Twigs’s own kitchen, she informed me, has a shelf of teas as long as the S.U.V. we were riding in: jasmine and rose “for beauty,” lemon…
Mourning David Lynch in a City on Fire
One night in January, 2002, during the initial theatrical run of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” a friend and I, students at the…
A Mother and Daughter’s Joint Becoming
In the course of the project, as Barbara grew older, Wywrot’s photographs became more collaborative, and more humorous, with mother and…
The Aesthetic Empire of Alma Mahler-Werfel
The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of…
The Poet Shane McCrae Goes Back to Hell
Along Interstate 71, in a flat stretch of Ohio, an otherwise modest billboard proclaims that “hell is real.” The type, set against a black…
Provence in the West Village, at Zimmi’s
There’s traditional luxury to be had, if you’re looking for that sort of thing—a truffle-laden pasta special one night, toast soldiers…
The Hidden Histories Lost in the Los Angeles Fires
At her house, Kohner-Zuckerman showed me souvenirs of her parents’ world, which were nestled amid memorabilia of her beach days. One was a…
The Brief and Brilliant Career of Sara Gómez
Such new forms of behavior and new ways of thinking are exactly what Gómez brings to light in her feature, “One Way or Another.” The…
Frederick Wiseman’s Real-Life Epics
Mary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of…
“Hugh Jackman LIVE” and “Beckett Briefs” Make a Spectacle of Time’s Passage
In “Hugh Jackman LIVE, from New York with Love,” the Oscar-nominated, multiple Tony Award-winning Marvel mega-super-über-ultrastar can’t…
The Political Drama of “I’m Still Here” Is Moving but Airbrushed
In 1970, six years into Brazil’s military dictatorship, Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing politician, returned to the…
“This Woman” and Her Tangled World
The Chinese artist and filmmaker Alan Zhang, in her first feature, dramatizes a married woman’s struggle for freedom amid financial and…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…