Style
Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer
I believe that the single best dessert a person can have after a satisfying restaurant meal involves walking five to eight city blocks to a nearby ice-cream shop, to get...
Is “Thunderbolts*” Marvel’s Attempt to Salvage the Superhero Genre?
In the run-up to the première of “Thunderbolts*,” on May 2nd, Marvel earned some light mockery for the art-house vibe of one of its trailers. Over an edgy E.D.M. beat,...
Summer Culture Preview
High-stakes competition makes for high drama in “F1 the Movie” (June 27), directed by Joseph Kosinski, starring Brad Pitt as a Formula One driver who is forced out of action...
What It’s Like to Root for the Knicks
I’m not always so good at taking notes on basketball games that I plan to write about, especially if my haunted team, the New York Knicks, is among the contestants....
Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber Star in a Pair of Psychosexual Slugfests
“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,” setting out a catalogue of revolutionary theatrical...
What Casey Means and MAHA Want You to Fear
If you close your eyes and imagine an up-from-the-bootstraps embodiment of boomer triumphalism—the ambitious young technocrat of a systems novel by Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, sprinting toward his fully...
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” Goes Hard on Valediction
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a...
The Making of “Rust” Was a Tragedy. Its Final Form Is a Missed Opportunity
Some movies eventually become inseparable from the stories of their production. Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie” are now inextricably associated with their star Tippi Hedren’s allegations of the director’s...
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?
In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the...
The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward, infiltrated late-nineteenth-century culture as an agent...
