Once Crawford slipped into her style, she never slipped out of it—not publicly. “Never in the thousands of times in our association, was she ever less than perfectly dressed, in full makeup,” a publicist at M-G-M recalled. “She was never casual, not even if it was for an audience of only 20 fans. She had … Read more
In “This World of Tomorrow,” a nostalgic time-travel romance by Tom Hanks and James Glossman, now at the Shed, the Oscar-winning actor (and novice playwright) plays Bert Allenberry, a tech titan dissatisfied with life in 2089. You can’t blame him: even though his existence looks glossy and smooth, every scene set in the future takes … Read more
As part of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West smear campaign, Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest ex-classmates: Glinda, a smiling yet conflicted mascot for the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard’s guard. But Fiyero’s heart belongs to Elphaba, and, even as he and Glinda … Read more
I’m Donut ?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty is the nama doughnut (the word, in Japanese, means “raw,” or “fresh”), an impossibly moist and light cumulus of starch and sugar that seems captured by … Read more
Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology. Every other event on our civic calendar asks us to remember something noble, or to mourn something tragic, or to celebrate something grand or abstract, but Thanksgiving just asks us to be hungry together, and then to eat. … Read more
Oil and masculinity: both are oftentimes crude, both are considered toxic in the twenty-first century. So it only makes sense that the two are as tightly bound as a bolt on a rig in “Landman,” the latest hit series from the neo-Western television auteur Taylor Sheridan, on Paramount+. At the center of the show is … Read more
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his rangy teen-age son particularly antagonized him—“Sam called Steve his nemesis,” Shepard’s mother wrote in her diary. “Sam, Sr. came to regard his only son as female,” … Read more
From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New Yorker noted in a review shortly after the restaurant’s opening) “hails from New Jersey but cooks more like a French countrywoman.” That may be true—the restaurant … Read more
There is a street in Naples, Via San Gregorio Armeno, where you can find shop after shop presided over by artisans whose specialty is building Nativity scenes out of papier-maché, terra-cotta, wax, and cloth. It is an art with roots in the eighteenth century, of which the Baroque crèche brought out by the Metropolitan Museum … Read more
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as his love interest Jane. During a fireside dinner, Drebin recounts a past heartbreak. “It’s the same old story,” he says. “Boy … Read more