World
The Best Podcasts of 2024
What a year, eh? In podcasts, as everywhere else lately, volatility abounds—yet beauty and wonder abound, too. Ongoing budget cuts (and debatable decision-making) meant that we lost more terrific...
Are Grownups Just Giant Kids?
Late this past summer, I was at the convenience store with my son, buying ice cream, when a Tesla Cybertruck pulled into the lot. Peter is six, and fascinated...
The Best Albums of 2024
There is perhaps no moment in history when being a music critic felt like a respectable, lucrative, or essential position, though there are certainly years when it maybe seemed...
Converting to Judaism in the Wake of October 7th
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband. He’d grown up in an Orthodox family, and his parents, my...
The Meditative Organ Soundscapes of Kali Malone
“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons:...
The Deep Elation of Working with Wood
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry’s book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages. Once we’ve read...
John Cuneo’s “Garden Party”
One of the best ways to feel a sense of belonging, or to forge a connection to a city, is to cheer the triumphs and weather the defeats of...
Houston’s Thriving West African Food Scene
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa. Made...
What You Can Do with an Electric Volkswagen Bus
The Shapiro brothers, Gefen and Yona, who are nineteen and sixteen and Harpo Marx look-alikes, own eleven cars between them, including a Girl Scout-green 1972 MG Midget, a blueberry-blue...
A Bahraini Photographer Returns Home
Unexpected juxtapositions like these appear across the photographer Ali Al Shehabi’s series “As I Lay Between Two Seas,” which documents the contours of everyday life in Bahrain. Taken over...
