World
Racing Mount Pleasant Makes Quiet Emotions Sound Grand
The Frank O’Hara poem “Katy” features seven lines of self-assessing declarations. It is the fifth line that I get the most mileage out of: “I am never quiet, I...
How to Survive Your Song Going Viral on TikTok
If you’ve heard the 2019 hit song “Tek It,” by the New York City-based band Cafuné, there’s a good chance it’s not the version that the group originally created....
When the Man Tried to Sell Minimalism to the Counterculture
“The Man can’t bust our music,” an advertisement in the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb proclaimed, in November, 1968. The accompanying image showed seven presumed radicals huddled in a jail...
“Eden” Is a Messy Survival Thriller with Nietzschean Appeal
The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron Howard, a director whose cinematic disposition can...
“Eden” Is a Desert-Island Thriller That Despoils Itself
The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron Howard, a director whose cinematic disposition can...
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were...
Cindy Sherman’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8,...
What The New Yorker Was Watching in 1925
Film criticism at The New Yorker started with a bang: the first movie reviewed in the first issue, dated February 21, 1925, was the German director F. W. Murnau’s...
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had...
The Celebrity Picture Book Boom
There are no guilty pleasures in childhood. It is only as an adult that I feel a certain sheepishness when recalling one of my favorite picture books, “Ann Likes...
