World
Curzio Malaparte’s Shock Tactics
“You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three years into Mussolini’s dictatorship. Gobetti, twenty-four...
Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys...
Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever?The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and...
What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925
Several months before the first issue of The New Yorker appeared, Harold Ross’s fund-raising prospectus promised, along with much else, that “Judgment will be passed upon new books of...
An Enduring Archive of Queer Writers’ Portraits
Giard grew up in a working-class family in Hartford, Connecticut. When he entered public high school, he was shunted onto the remedial track, because, as he wrote, “it was...
A Pioneering Photographer Revives Her Slide Show of Lesbian Life
For several years, starting in 1979, the photographer Joan E. Biren, or JEB, travelled around presenting a slide show that she’d spent years building. “I started touring at a...
A Summer Reading List of Lighthearted Mysteries
For many readers, summer is the time for breezy, undemanding books—the kind you can toss in a beach bag and finish before the sunburn sets in. Sue Halpern, a...
The Shrewdly Regenerative Apocalypse of “28 Years Later”
Perhaps because cannibalism comes with the territory, the zombie movie has proved uncommonly immune to a certain strain of critical attack: the kind that instinctively finds fault with the...
“The Gilded Age” Is a Poor Man’s Period Drama
In the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” the characters are keenly aware that they live in interesting times. Early in the series, which is set in the eighteen-eighties, an...
Ben Shahn, the Lefty Artist Who Was Left Behind
From the late nineteen-forties through the mid-fifties, Ben Shahn was one of the most in-demand artists in America. Whether you were mailing a package at a post office, flipping...
