World
The Rediscovery of “Naked Acts” Expands Film History
Movies that rely on symbolism usually do so through conspicuous artifice, whether that of high style (Hitchcock, Hawks, Wes Anderson) or of rigorous reserve (Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais). But...
Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet?
In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020,...
A New Book About Plant Intelligence Highlights the Messiness of Scientific Change
During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at the University of Washington started noticing something strange in the college’s experimental forest. For years, a blight of caterpillars had been...
How Members of the Chinese Diaspora Found Their Voices
On October 13, 2022, more than two years into China’s totalizing COVID lockdowns, a man wearing a yellow helmet stood on the Sitong Bridge, an expressway overpass in downtown...
Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home
Three years ago, Emma Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, got word of a micro-budget horror movie called “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” The film, which became...
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Pawns in the Park”
People tend to move with speed and purpose around New York City, so its public spaces are not often associated with sitting and thinking for hours on end. Yet,...
Notes on a Last-Minute Safari, by David Sedaris
It was a good year for Christmas parties. At one, I met a number of authors I had always admired. This can be tricky, but they were all lovely....
Richard Linklater Unmasks Glen Powell in “Hit Man”
The director dissects a pivotal scene in his noir-inspired screwball comedy, which is loosely based on the real-life story of a fake hit man who helped detectives bust people...
What COVID Did to Fiction
In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would sometimes comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”...
