Unsorted
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The…
Tag
splitscreenimagerightfullbleed
News
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…
Unsorted
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…
Unsorted
Sterling K. Brown’s Upstanding Archetype
There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when…
Unsorted
Was the Renaissance Real?
Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and…
Unsorted
L.A.’s Food Culture, Transformed by Immigration Raids
In early July, while shopping at a farmers’ market on the east side of Los Angeles, where I live, I bought a few packages of raw chicken…
Unsorted
The First Time America Went Beard Crazy
A stroll through the Presidential-portrait wing at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is, among other things, a game of…
Culture
Ryan Davis’s Junk-Drawer Heart
On Easter Sunday, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter Ryan Davis opened a matinée show for Bill Callahan in the assembly room of a…
Unsorted
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver…
Unsorted
What Was Paul Gauguin Looking For?
In June, 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti. He was forty-three. With him—according to Sue Prideaux, whose new biography of Gauguin,…
Unsorted
“Too Much” Remixes the Rom-Com
Starting over in New York is a cliché for a reason; so is starting over by leaving it behind. Lena Dunham, who became the poster child for…
Unsorted
Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs.…
Unsorted
Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
“Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while…
Unsorted
Your Hip Surgery, My Headache, by David Sedaris
It was nice to get away, if only for a few hours. To have someone bring me bowls of nuts and glasses of water. At the table, I mentioned…
Unsorted
The Portland Bar That Screens Only Women’s Sports
When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball…
Unsorted
So You Want to Be a Genius
Let’s say there’s another pandemic. This time, a lethal disease spreads through contact with other people’s fecal matter. Precision toilet…
Unsorted
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…
Unsorted
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…
Business
“Your Friends and Neighbors” and the Perils of the Rich-People-Suck Genre
The first episode of the new Apple TV+ drama “Your Friends and Neighbors” takes pains to explain how one can rake in…
Unsorted
Returning to the Scene of My Brutal Rape
A woman is running. In the path, a man appears as if from nowhere. He is masked and he holds a knife. What are her choices? On one side is…
Unsorted
The Self-Taught Cook Who Mastered the Flour Tortilla
As a kid growing up in Hermosillo, the biggest city in the arid northern Mexican state of Sonora, Ruben Leal took the region’s signature…
Unsorted
Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber Star in a Pair of Psychosexual Slugfests
“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,”…
Culture
The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward,…
Unsorted
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out…