Fashion
The Met’s “Costume Art” Makes a Case for Fashion
Some of the pairings can be quite on the nose. In the “Classical Body” section, a golden Issey Miyake breastplate and bodice, molded to…
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Culture
What Science Knows About Grief
When I asked Shear about the biological aftermath of grief, she brought up two-person neuroscience, an emerging discipline that studies…
Culture
The Curious Career of “the American Dream”
The American Dream has always had its skeptics, and not just among those who have been institutionally marginalized. Rags-to-riches…
Culture
Edmonia Lewis, the Misunderstood Sculptor Who Brought Stone to Life
The exhibition opens with Lewis’s sculpture “Forever Free” (1866-67). Roughly three and a half feet tall, it shows a man and a woman…
Culture
What Did “Lady Chatterley” Liberate?
On that matter, Cuthbertson does little more than note the problem—but then neither does anyone else. The First Amendment offers no real…
Culture
Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up
It is frustrating—and characteristic of his somewhat monomaniacal approach—that Fiedler does not consider, alongside the seduction plot,…
Culture
The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses
Goodman was born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, on April 9, 1925. (The date was finally confirmed by a data collector who…
News
Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard Resists Stagnation
The lyrical direction of this record intrigued me. You are using language and imagery that could be directed toward another person, but it…
Culture
What Dogs See When They Look at Us
Laqueur takes the reader on a nearly encyclopedic trip through this truth and its consequences, ranging from Giotto’s dogs—calm,…
Culture
How Good Is the U.S. Men’s World Cup Team, Really?
Pochettino’s approach seems to involve preaching optimism and a “why-not-us?” ethos, channelling a dash of “Ted Lasso” into his sunny…
News
Mary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. Is Her Reputation Salvageable?
In these early years, Mary helped more often than she hindered, as when she steered Lincoln away from accepting the dead-end territorial…
News
Chaya Czernowin Gives Voice to a Wounded World
Global disaster shadowed this year’s Witten Days for New Chamber Music, an ostensibly insular contemporary-music festival that takes place…
Culture
Rostam Batmanglij Wanders to the Edges of American Sound
Other songs on “American Stories” are more personal. “Like a Spark” opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the…
Culture
Harriet Clark’s Début Is a New Kind of Coming-of-Age Novel
Now a third joins their company, Harriet Clark’s superb first novel, “The Hill” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It is narrated by Suzanna, who…
Culture
The Many Forms of Marcel Duchamp
In 1905, Duchamp learned that, if he got certified as an essential “art worker,” his obligatory military service would be reduced from two…
Culture
How Long Can Martha Graham’s Dance Revolution Last?
At the heart of her method—then and now—is contraction and release. Imagine a breath is sharply expelled, hollowing out the core until the…
Culture
Sharp Claws at “Becky Shaw” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball”
Still, what distinguishes Gionfriddo is not her ear for cruelty but her ability to see beyond it, and to shift the prism of audience…
Culture
A Lesson of Vietnam: Getting in Is Easier than Getting Out
The war was sustained by a seductive delusion: that an unwinnable conflict might still be managed into an outcome short of humiliation.…
Culture
The Violence in Vermeer
As yet, archival research has failed to substantiate this conversation, although it appears, more or less intact, in the 2003 movie…
Culture
In Marie NDiaye’s Spellbinding New Novel, Witchcraft Stays in the Family
Witchcraft was traditionally a form of occult knowledge: esoteric, hidden, available only to initiates. Now, though, with the widespread…
Culture
Under the Influence at the Whitney Biennial
Although Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s simultaneously austere and sensual handblown glass sculptures—which are light-bulb-shaped and affixed…
Culture
How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?
From ancient Rome to the era of A.I., people have prized originality, but the line where influence ends and cribbing begins is notoriously…