World
How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown...
In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home
That’s meant to be remedied by Calder Gardens, a new institution taking shape in a half-buried berm on the Parkway, not far from that paternal fountain. The site joins...
What I Wanted, What I Got
The popular girl at my elementary school—let’s call her Denise—was not blond like Barbie but pretty in a conventional manner I envied. She had brown hair, skin that tanned...
Brittany Howard and Alabama Shakes Return with Audacious New Music
The first thing Julio Torres says in “Color Theories” is to deny that he’s made an “Off Broadway play.” (His ponytail, curling overhead like an anglerfish’s light, bobbles as...
Why New Yorkers Yearn for Barneys
On September 8, 1993, the opening night of the brand-new Barneys flagship store on Madison Avenue, the escalators shrieked. The two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-million-dollar palace of consumption was sheathed in pristine French...
“Cashing Out” Examines an Investment Strategy That Profited from AIDS Deaths
As grateful as I am to the director Matt Nadel for making “Cashing Out,” a vital and outstanding film about a terrible time, it also made me angry—angry about...
Stephen Shore’s Precocious Adolescent Eye
How did this happen? To begin with, Shore had an uncommonly encouraging and generous family. His uncle Leo, a naval engineer, noticed that his nephew was a budding tinkerer...
Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons
How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven’s hammering three- or four-note motives, Schubert’s juxtapositions...
The War on Trans Art
In July, the artist Amy Sherald pulled out of a large-scale show at the Smithsonian after learning that she might not be able to include a portrait of Lady...
