World
A New Wave of Cinematic Riches Arrives at Cannes
“When will this fucking movie be over with?” It’s a question that surfaces often at the Cannes Film Festival, where hour blurs into hour, movie bleeds into movie, and, by...
Briefly Noted Book Reviews
Valley of Forgetting, by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead). This stunning immersion into decades of Alzheimer’s research in Colombia follows a keen doctor, Francisco Lopera, as he and a team look...
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life
Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but perhaps they’ve just made the same points over...
R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
Even the establishment distrusted the establishment. Shortly after the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy—the Attorney General and the brother of the President—asked Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence, if the...
Pavement Inspires a Strange, Loving Bio-Pic
I once assumed that Pavement would be forgotten by later generations, just as the knowing, sarcastic wit of the nineteen-nineties came to seem passé in the two-thousands. The band’s music...
Times Square’s Revolving Restaurant Comes Around Again
Seeing New York City from above—from the upper deck of the Empire State Building, or from the window of an airplane making an up-the-Hudson approach to LaGuardia Airport—is always a...
The Everyday Dramas of Manhattan Rush Hour
Salacuse is the kind of person who always seems to have a project or five under way. I first met him in 2000, and we’ve been friends ever since. (We...
The President Who Became a Prophet
On April 1st, the day before President Donald Trump’s tariffs cratered global markets, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “to trust the President’s instinct on the economy.” In the days...
In Defense of Despair
The Joke I tell that no one laughs at goes like this: I picked a pretty rough time to actually want to be alive; in retrospect, back when I wanted...
Hilton Als on the Visionary World of Alva Rogers
I met Alva Rogers years ago, through a mutual friend, and her various incarnations—actress, singer, artistic director, writer, puppeteer—have always been remarkable to me. As a young woman, Rogers posed...
