I walked into the Tribeca Film Festival première of Netflix’s “The Rachel Divide,” a domestic portrait of our modern minstrel Rachel Dolezal, already feeling bored. That’s not how I like to approach a work of art. But what could the Read More …
Imagine Roy Cohn, Harry Potter, Joan of Arc, and Eliza Doolittle all at the same dinner party. Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants. You’d get something approaching the 2018 Tony nominations, which were announced on Tuesday. It’s an odd race, reflecting an Read More …
We went to Montgomery, Alabama, to think about history, our country’s and our own. As a historian and a novelist, neither of us is especially adept at the confessional mode; it’s possible that we take pains to avoid it. We Read More …
The comedian John Mulaney makes a point of thanking his audiences several times for coming to see him perform. He did it a decade ago, when the crowds were small, and does it now, in considerably larger venues, such as Read More …
The minute is a strangely flexible unit of time. Waiting for a dreaded event—an interview, a Supreme Court decision—it is as leaden and as detectable as a stone in the palm; when revelling in a welcome one, it takes flight. Read More …
Mark Zuckerberg has spent most of his adult life apologizing, but he hasn’t managed to improve much. Ever since he was caught scraping faces from Harvard’s intranet for Facemash, his viral hot-girl-comparison Web site, in 2003, he has been explaining Read More …
As rollouts go, the very short press blitz for the new season of “Arrested Development,” the first eight episodes of which are streaming on Netflix (with more to come at a later date), was downright Bluthian. First, on May 4th, Read More …
The workplace tell-all is an irresistible form of storytelling, and restaurants are among the most alluring of workplaces: hot and frenetic and physically taxing, with a permissive social culture of drugs and sex, they’re a crucible for drama. Peering into Read More …
Every so often, George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” finds me and demands a reckoning. The essay, first published in 1936, describes an incident that may or may not have actually taken place, from a period of Orwell’s life, in Read More …
The success of “A Quiet Place,” the new horror thriller directed by John Krasinski, is a sign of viewers craving emptiness, of a yearning for some cinematic white noise to drown out troubling thoughts and observations with a potently simple Read More …