Critics and their worn-out thesauruses eventually do a number on almost every musical instrument, but the harp is perhaps the most routinely maligned by adjectives: ethereal, celestial, ghostly, spectral, delicate, feminine, angelic, soft. These are good words, and often germane, Read More …
A hundred and eight years ago, the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen voted to honor the struggle against male oppression by creating an International Women’s Day, now held every year on March 8th. If the celebration represented a Read More …
Podcast-wise, 2017 was arguably the year of “The Daily,” the beautifully produced, gently voiced narrative-news offering from the Times, hosted by Michael Barbaro, which started last January and quickly became indispensable. The show, which parses a different news story in Read More …
The other day, I biked the length of Forty-eighth street from Seventh Avenue to Sixth Avenue and encountered an unusual view. In the middle of the south side of the block, where a clutch of music stores had once been, Read More …
The New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair once described his particular genius at the keyboard as “that little gimmick I does.” I don’t think he was being especially coy, or even self-effacing—when your instinct for something is so finely hewed that Read More …
Late one night last October, I was practicing what I like to call anti-self-care—lying under the covers, scrolling compulsively on my phone, and vaguely hoping that someone would leap through the screen and club me on the forehead—when I came Read More …
I have gone to Burning Man several times, but its founder, Larry Harvey, was not someone I knew very much about. Harvey, who was born in 1948, was raised outside Portland, Oregon, by adoptive parents. After a stint in the Read More …
My eye trouble started more than three decades ago, when I was forty-one. I discovered that if I closed my left eye, straight vertical lines curved extravagantly, and I could not read. I became sensitive to bright lights. A retina Read More …
In Season 1 of the Marvel series “Jessica Jones,” the titular character, an alcoholic and unfriendly private investigator with superpowers, tracked down and eventually killed the villain Kilgrave, a smarmy, effete Brit with mind-control powers. Kilgrave had kidnapped and repeatedly Read More …
On a recent afternoon in West Hollywood, at the front desk of the Standard Hotel, Boots Riley stood underneath a box-shaped glass tank where, in the evening, girls—sometimes men, occasionally drag queens, but usually women—sit in a floating, clear container. Read More …