News
Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us
That may not exactly sound like a call to arms, but the title of an expert and engaging new introduction to the philosopher encourages us…
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Culture
How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as…
Culture
How Corporate Feminism Went from “Love Me” to “Buy Me”
In retrospect, the book feels like an artifact of a fleetingly optimistic moment, and of a time when the mainstreaming of feminism—recall…
Culture
Tame Impala Is an Obsessive, Not a Perfectionist
The magic of Parker’s music—what makes his records so restless, dithery, dynamic—hinges on the minuscule yet crucial difference between…
Culture
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as…
Lifestyle
Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself
But it wasn’t until he arrived in Paris, during his junior year abroad, that he could truly nurture his bohemian streak. The city was…
Culture
A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met
John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a…
News
The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”
The jokes started before rehearsals did. “Waiting for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure”; “Party On, Godot!” How…
Culture
Gertrude Stein’s Love Language
Stein’s authority as an arbiter was bolstered by an ambiguously gendered seduction. Genius, she believed, was a masculine trait, and she…
Culture
Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book…
Culture
“The Lowdown” Is a Noir for Our Era
Some actors you can watch doing the same thing over and over again. Cary Grant built a career on smirking suavity; Cate Blanchett has made…
Culture
The Autocrat of English Usage
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part…
Culture
Ian McEwan Casts the Climate Crisis as a Story of Adultery
At the start of “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan’s eighteenth novel, the year is 2119 and the humanities are still in crisis. Thomas…
Culture
The Uses and Abuses of “Antisemitism”
How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry.…
Culture
Reading the New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America
As for pace, “Shadow Ticket” reads like one of its subplots, about the Trans-Trianon 2000, a two-thousand-kilometre motorcycle circuit…
Culture
Yasmina Reza’s “Art” Feeds Our Appetite for Argument as Entertainment
Is there anything left of the old concept of debate? The practice of good-faith argument feels harder and harder to find, even as…
Culture
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…
Culture
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…
Business
The Return of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Masterpiece, “The Brothers Size”
At the beginning of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s poetic drama “The Brothers Size,” now at the Shed, one of the play’s three actors pours white…
Culture
Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor
In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It…
Culture
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed…
Culture
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…
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…
Culture
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…