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How David Lynch Became an Icon of Cinema
Thursday morning, I happened to be rereading Pauline Kael’s classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” A few hours later, I learned that David Lynch had died, and...
Are We Living in a Dystopia?
In a recent episode of “Silo,” the sci-fi series from Apple TV+, a character who does not have long to live puts on a virtual-reality headset. She’s spent her...
Ali Smith’s Playful Dystopia
Recently, just before lunch with the Scottish author Ali Smith, at Moro, a beloved North African and Mediterranean place in London’s Exmouth Market, I locked myself out of my...
The Ghost’s-Eye View of Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence”
Although Steven Soderbergh started out as an independent filmmaker, he may be Hollywood’s last true believer. He made fine studio movies back when star-studded genre pictures were still studios’...
Garth Risk Hallberg’s Essential Joyce Carol Oates
Like many people, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg was daunted by the size of the celebrated American writer Joyce Carol Oates’s body of work, which encompasses dozens of novels...
What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok
For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Cal Newport is filling in for Kyle Chayka.In 2013, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I Never Joined Facebook.” Social media had...
How Do You Know When a System Has Failed?
At some point in the past decade or two, dance-music d.j.s discovered a way of punctuating their sets with a prank. Just as the music was reaching a crescendo,...
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Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Collapse of the Hollywood #MeToo Era
In the faux aristocracy that is Hollywood, a Blake Lively should not have reason to meaningfully cross paths with a Justin Baldoni. Lively, best known for playing Serena van...
The Enigmatic Artistry of Terrence Malick
Biographies of great artists are of inherent interest, but in the case of Terrence Malick, one of the greatest living filmmakers, there’s an extra fascination because of the great...
Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews
Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was promoted by the Bible and fed...
