World
Haruki Murakami on Rethinking Early Work
Haruki Murakami’s new novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” is also a return to earlier works: a novella he published in Japan, in 1980, when he was thirty-one,...
Into the Phones of Teens
About midway through “Social Studies,” Lauren Greenfield’s new five-part FX docuseries about teens and their relationship to social media, we see one of the show’s protagonists—an eighteen-year-old University of...
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” Transcends the Holiday-Movie Genre
It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a...
The End of Kamala Harris’s Campaign
At nearly every Harris rally I attended, whether at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago or at an arena in Savannah, Georgia, a lone protester would stand up in...
Offering Dignity for Those Who Die Alone in “People Like Us”
Sonia Bermúdez divides her time between two cemeteries. In the town of Riohacha, Colombia, she manages the Central Cemetery, a quiet maze of white-walled mausoleums decorated with crosses and...
“A Real Pain” Fails to Stay in Its Discomfort Zone
A road movie with a twist, “A Real Pain”—which Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in—builds the eventful but thin foreground of its journey on a deep foundation of...
The Artificial State
“Jacob Javits of New York is the first United States senator to become fully automated,” the Chicago Tribune announced in 1962 from the Republican state convention in Buffalo, where...
Barry Blitt’s “Tightrope”
As the 2024 Presidential race nears its end, the country seems more and more divided, with democracy hanging in the balance. For the cover of the November 11, 2024,...
Helen, Help Me: What If You’re Dining with a Jerk?
We don’t always get to choose our dining companions. What’s the right move when you’re seated next to a boor at a restaurant to which you’d like to return?...
Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown
When I think of Dorothy Parker’s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. A sunken battleship resting at the bottom...
