Since the publication of his 2000 true-crime book, The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère has established himself as France’s... Read More
I wasn’t going to watch it. I was going to sit this one out. But I’m a big fan of Broad City, so I did it. I clicked... Read More
Before Florida became a national punchline, Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry was already down south lovingly... Read More
It is the streaming series Yellowstone where America sees its reflection, the struggle between good and evil. Sheridan expects... Read More
The controversy over Netflix’s new four-part documentary Queen Cleopatra has been portrayed as a backlash to diversity in... Read More
"Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America.” Perhaps you need to be a slight stranger to this... Read More
One of the greatest living filmmakers now lives in an assisted living facility in midtown Manhattan. He squints at me from across our table... Read More
For more than 70 years, I lived under the same head of state: not a despot, of the kind who clings to power for fear of ending up like... Read More
Assume, for the purposes of this exercise, that you are piloting a small craft, no more than 30 feet in length, and you motor out of the... Read More
The first shot of the Rust Belt in Slap Shot (1977) surveys a local steel mill which is shutting down and throwing ten thousand... Read More
When Annie Ernaux opens the front door to me at her home in Cergy, 40 minutes outside Paris, she immediately bursts out laughing.... Read More
Late in the action of Martin Scorsese’s enthralling account of the methodical elimination of Native Americans in early-1920s... Read More
Do you remember the homosexual? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? He was, for a period, a key figure in the conversation about gay... Read More
Our culture’s obsession with the appearance of women is nothing new. Many societies have long fixated on the female face and figure as... Read More
I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The... Read More
This British Museum exhibition is about ancient luxury, but its content shows a commendable frugality. Almost all of what is on show... Read More
Rick Dalton, the fictional star of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” has died at the age of 90.... Read More
Were it not for heritage — for the accounts our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers have handed down to us like an oral... Read More
Heather Armstrong didn’t mean to become a “mommy blogger”. In 1997, she taught herself to code, and began working at a Los... Read More
Most of what people think they know about J. Edgar Hoover is nonsense, typically associated with his wearing a dress, high heels, and a... Read More
For decades now, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas.... Read More
While many of us, stateside, squandered the salad days of our pandemic bingeing Tiger King or revisiting The Sopranos and Girls, Ian Penman... Read More
It may be hard to picture now, when American children spend seemingly every waking hour absorbed in Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but once... Read More
I was thinking that Emma Cline’s writing reminded me of Cat Power’s cover of “Satisfaction,” where she removed the... Read More
David Grann’s latest nonfiction epic, The Wager, follows a heaving imperial British warship of the same name as it sets out in 1740 on... Read More
Readers of fiction often ask to be transported. To be “moved” is the great passive verb of experiencing art: we are absorbed, we... Read More
Complaints about The Man were a common theme in film and television through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. As with so many parts of pop... Read More
It turned out that this year’s most coveted—and impossible to attain—ticket was not for the new Indiana Jones sequel or the... Read More
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Andy Warhol was not entitled to draw on a prominent photographer’s portrait of... Read More
From the ads I saw, Jury Duty looked like the last TV show I’d want to add to my watchlist. “12 jurors. 11... Read More
In 2005, the journal Obesity Research published a study that, had we but known it, told us everything we needed to know about our... Read More
Travelers to Unimaginable Lands is that rarity: true biblio-therapy. Lucid, mature, wise, with hardly a wasted word, it not only deepens... Read More
We have had reason of late to think anew about the Soviet Union and the legacy of the Cold War—the fighting in Ukraine reverberates... Read More
Louis XIV of France — the longest reigning monarch the world has ever known (born in 1638, he reigned from 1643 until his death in... Read More

For enthusiasts of Haruki Murakami, last month brought two major events in two different countries. One is the publication, in Japan, of his latest novel, “Machi to Sono Futashika na Kabe” (“The City and Its Uncertain Walls”). The other is the release, in the United States, of “Saules Aveugles, Femme Endormie” (“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”), an animated feature based on several o... Read More
Some arguments are best suited for t-shirts, not books: any attempt to expand on them weakens them. Rarely is this phenomenon displayed more starkly than in Philip Ewell’s idea of “music theory’s white racial frame,” now stretched to book length in his recently published On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. Over the past few years, Ewell’s verbal, tweeted, and... Read More
Salman rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers. She later causes a city to rise overnight from enchanted seeds, presides as its queen, and li... Read More