My cat, Harriet, is curled up on the TV console when I walk into the living room. She blinks at me, slowly. Cats blinking at you is supposed to be a sign of affection. I blink back. “Look at you on the . . .” I trail off. What is she sitting on? A cabinet? … Read more
These days, C.K. occupies a strange place in the culture. He is in a cancellation limbo, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. C.K. isn’t too cancelled to perform several sold-out shows at the Beacon, but he’s cancelled enough that, if you manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to … Read more
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your strip malls. These are dumps, but our dumps. Among my own cherished dumps are old newsrooms. My first was the … Read more
It’s easy to think of music as ephemeral and essentially free, rather than a thing you can dotingly select, acquire, and present to your nearest and dearest. Yet music is a courageous and intimate gift. For decades, lovers—would-be; actual—have deployed painstakingly compiled mixtapes to communicate emotions that felt impossible to express otherwise. Music is a … Read more
It was somewhere on a deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 A.M., with a rain machine, while I was shooting “White Noise.” I think I felt, Oh God, I don’t know that I like doing this. That movie was just very difficult for me for several reasons. We shot during COVID, which was a … Read more
Each pot takes six to seven hours to build, with coils that she flattens into thick bands. She starts a new series by drawing the forms she has in mind, though the actual shape always emerges in the act of building; the clay is alive, she says, and it resists its maker. When she moved … Read more
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” his 1966 Shakespearian meta-theatrical puzzle, about tertiary characters grappling with their inexorable fate, mainstreamed conversations about probability and droll ennui (“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it”). It hit the theatre like a comet. Even in an alternate reality in which … Read more
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation. Ibsen’s five acts are compressed into two, with a total running time of less than ninety minutes. As a result, the collapse of Stockmann’s … Read more
For the cover of the December 8, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Klaas Verplancke wanted to capture how, as he put it, “shiny gold pales in comparison to the charm of Christmas lights.” The image also highlights the dissonance between the seemingly endless demands and executive orders coming from the White House, and the spirit of … Read more
Much like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was utterly devoted to the Party’s ideals, but she also had a keen eye for grandstanding, and she noticed that some of her comrades seemed more committed to social climbing than to curing society’s ills. As a provocation, she … Read more