World
The Enduring Power of Peter Hujar’s “Portraits in Life and Death”
There’s a self-portrait that shows Peter Hujar mid-leap. The picture is taken in a room, presumably in Hujar’s own East Village loft—at a time, 1974, when it was hard...
Ryan Murphy’s Latest Era of Cynical Hits
Ryan Murphy’s true-crime series seldom drop without a splash. Shows like “American Crime Story” and “Monster” have their own gravitational pull, and so their revisionism matters. “Monsters: The Lyle...
The Bard of Turkish Alienation
It was a shock to learn that the writer Oğuz Atay was only forty-three years old when he died in 1977, of a brain tumor. The eight stories in...
Should You Just Give Up?
Around fifteen years ago, an old college friend of mine had a close call in the mountains. He and a companion were on a ski trip when they decided...
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “New Heights”
True New Yorkers know that certain spots in the outer boroughs are more quintessentially New York than many places in Manhattan. For the cover of the October 14, 2024...
Rachel Kushner’s Covert Op Against Realism
The narrator of “Creation Lake” (Scribner), Rachel Kushner’s new novel, is the pseudonymous Sadie Smith, a thirty-four-year-old American who specializes in infiltrating tight-knit groups of rebels, radicals, and subversives....
How John Lewis Put a Legacy of Heroism to Use
In the early weeks of 2008, as Barack Obama was fighting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination, many Party members felt obliged to pick a side, and to...
The Gaza We Leave Behind
On a summer evening many years ago, my father and I sat on the roof of our family home in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, and we talked about...
The Drawings the Shakers Got from God
But this show is not about chairs, except for a single introductory piece. It is about watercolor, and ink, and paper, and how a group can embrace the visual...
