When sperm-whale calves are born, weighing about a ton, they are pretty helpless. They can’t immediately swim—their flukes are bent from being cramped in the womb—and, to use the technical term, they are “negatively buoyant.” Left to their own devices, they will sink. What the footage showed is that, for the first three hours of … Read more
The mega-popular K-pop stars have been on hiatus for nearly four years. Their new album, “Arirang,” tests the group’s staying power in the global cultural marketplace.
Lately, the writer Louise Erdrich—whose newest story collection, “Python’s Kiss,” is out this week—has been reading books about children who have lost their parents. As she explained recently, these books examine questions of rootedness and inheritance in roundabout ways. In illustrating the results of cutting children off from their parents, they are also reminders of … Read more
In March, we expect mercurial weather—intrat leo, exeunt agnus—but this March has taken things to an extreme. In Washington, D.C., where I live, the weather was eighty-four degrees and sunny one day, then just above freezing and snowing the next. Then came a promised torrential downpour, followed by tornado warnings that sent locals searching for … Read more
This sounds remarkably unlike something a real human might say, but then sounding like a human has never been Minnelli’s strength. In an early interview, she boasted about knowing the price of paper towels, and in her late fifties she was still talking of borrowing “a quarter from a chorus kid.” Grasping for a relatable … Read more
The actor and comedian tries his hand at captioning New Yorker cartoons.
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman embraces the fun and danger of Dadaism—for instance, when she encloses one of her glass sculptures in iron sheep shears in “blister iii” (2025).Art work by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman / Courtesy the artist / Hoffman Donahue; Photograph by Paul Salveson Although Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s simultaneously austere and sensual handblown glass sculptures—which are light-bulb-shaped and affixed … Read more
Throughout the past year, the cartoonist Roz Chast has been obsessively working with block printing, taking as much pleasure in the physical act of carving as in the creation of a reimagined city assembled from what she considers its most iconic elements. “I looked at many water towers to get an idea of their variety,” … Read more
In Act I, the stage picture is cluttered, the meaning unclear. This is an all too familiar issue at the modern Met, which, under the aegis of Peter Gelb, the general manager, more or less mandates clutter: hulking sets (by Es Devlin, in this case), choreography (by Annie-B Parson), video and live projections (by Ruth … Read more
A radical history of the Mets insists that baseball can still be the people’s game.