What does make a meal or a trip “successful”? It’s hard to say; this is one of the reasons that you can see value capture happening and be almost powerless to stop it. For many years, until I started writing this column, I was an editor at The New Yorker; I’ve now given up my … Read more

Where does such a charge leave Magellan, despoiler of every Eden he encounters? The film, to its credit, does not skimp on paradisiacal visions. Every shot of the tropics is a painterly study in lush foliage and golden-pink sunlight; the beauty of the natural world seems, if anything, magnified by Magellan’s encroaching, annihilating threat. Such … Read more

“The Pitt” easily could have felt like one long sequence of overstuffed, heavy-handed scenes. It’s a testament to the show’s artfulness that, most of the time, it doesn’t. Instead, we learn to care about issues that might otherwise feel abstract because we see them affecting characters’ lives. An anti-vax mother fights the doctors treating her … Read more

In Cromer’s framing, that hollowness begins to feel like the play’s sad theme: when someone is on a desperate hunt for meaning, the source of it ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It also turns the play into a story about Agnes, not Peter—her decision to believe, in “X-Files” terms. Coon, who is Letts’s wife, builds … Read more