Virginia Woolf had portrayed a similar tension between unity and fragmentation a decade earlier, with Mrs. Dalloway gazing at herself in the mirror: That was her self—pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible … Read more
A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible evocations of a Transylvanian vampire on the prowl: a reverse-negative image of Nosferatu’s carriage clattering through a forest; majestically disquieting sequences of a pestilential ship gliding across … Read more
For the cover of the December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026, issue, the artist Lorenzo Mattotti depicted a time-honored way to shake off the old and welcome the New Year. “I love drawing people dancing, capturing the different ways bodies move and reveal their owners’ personalities,” Mattotti said. For more covers about ringing in … Read more
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When … Read more
This is what happens when “The Dead Don’t Die” dies. That scintillating Jim Jarmusch movie, from 2019, a mashup of comedy, science fiction, horror, and apocalyptic rage amid brazen cruelty, is the kind of late masterwork that a longtime director occasionally unleashes if the stars line up. In its uninhibited inspiration, it’s also the kind … Read more
In Sunday’s season finale of “I Love L.A.,” Los Angeles is blamed for getting between the show’s protagonist, Maia (Rachel Sennott), and her live-in boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). After their relationship falls apart, Maia, an aspiring talent manager, absconds to New York with her only client, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), a party girl turned influencer, so … Read more
I went to look a bit on the Louvre’s website to see the provenance and discovered the recency of the acquisitions. The absence of information about the material was interesting, like always. When you look into the biography of objects, there are always gaps. Where were they before? In family collections, some in Germany—it’s very … Read more
Why not New York? Personal factors may have been at work: in L.A., Cage’s parents could provide support. But L.A. was also coming into its own as a cultural center. The Austrian-born architects R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra were building modernist residences, which Sample made a point of driving around to see. Schindler and his … Read more
Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the journal iScience published a study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London which analyzed how people across the … Read more
After feeding Han’s writing into GPT-4o, Chakrabarty fine-tuned fresh versions of the model on the work of twenty-nine other authors, including a close college friend of mine, Tony Tulathimutte. Jia Tolentino once praised Tony’s short stories, saying that his “deviant instincts crackle in nearly every line.” I’d been reading him since the early two-thousands—and yet … Read more