Actually, they did want to be. There is a reason Morris Michtom moved his family from the Lower East Side to the row houses of Brooklyn as soon as he could. (When his youngest son was born, in the back of his Tompkins Avenue candy store, he named him Benjamin Franklin; he might as well … Read more

In the far corner of the Halle, there’s a dim glow. Your job, you realize, is to grope your way toward that light, which reveals itself to be a projector beam hitting a colossal screen, almost nine hundred square feet. This is the centerpiece of “Liminals”: a fifty-minute film on loop. A few other tweaks … Read more

While the earth thus trembled, different and equally disruptive discoveries were happening in the sky. Thanks in part to improvements in telescope design, astronomers began identifying thousands of nebulae and star clusters, in essence making the universe suddenly larger in the same way that advances in geology had made the earth suddenly older. Meanwhile, some … Read more

Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is free-form, runs around three hours, and can feel like the old midnight sprawl reborn online. It’s the most popular podcast in the world, and there are … Read more

Spending a day in someone’s kitchen can tell us about their relationship to time, money, pleasure, and place.