Aretha Franklin’s voice was a pure, painful, and unforgettable expression of American history and American feeling, the collective experience of black Americans and her own life. The Queen of Soul, who died Thursday morning, was the daughter of the most Read More …

You just never know when high-school Latin is going to come in handy. The new Broadway musical “Head Over Heels,” at the Hudson Theatre, opens on a trompe-l’oeil backdrop of a classical archway, complete with Corinthian columns and an entablature Read More …

“Sally4Ever,” on HBO, is a midlife-crisis sitcom intrigued by all that oozes. Nothing human is alien to it, not suppurating psychic wounds, and especially not bodily functions. It distills human nature to its coarse extremes. In a moment of disability Read More …

1. They Also Wrote We may be living in the great age of “rediscovered” authors. Younger readers want to talk to me, all the time, about Shirley Jackson and John Williams and, of course, Philip K. Dick, who’s become so Read More …

Leningrad in the nineteen-seventies was a closed, stultifying world all to itself, a microcosm of the Soviet Union: a universe of muted grays and beige, where nothing much seemed to ever change. An artist who existed outside the system had Read More …

“Leaking” no longer seems an apt term for what’s coming from the Trump Administration—we will soon require aqueducts to manage these flows—but certain new bits of information can still make a weird splash. The release, last week, of a recorded Read More …

After two screenings and thirty-seven e-mail exchanges, I met Jonah Hill in a boardroom in midtown Manhattan adorned with a giant flat-screen TV and a wall completely covered in cork. He entered, wearing a black ensemble and amber-tinted glasses, and Read More …

In 1997, after watching a friend, inspired by “Jerry Maguire,” cold-call a big sports agency for an internship, I talked my way into a summer job at an Asian-American newspaper in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was my first brush with Read More …

Succulents—drought-friendly, fireproof, angular, Zen—long ago attained the status of design cliché, a living version of the shag rug, Heath mug, Eames chair. But now a particular species, Dudleya farinosa (stage name: Powdery Liveforever), a wild roseate plant with silvery, pink-tipped Read More …

An inarticulate misery, and yet the desperate need to articulate it, is what brought the thunderous wonder of Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” to the earth. In August of 1932, the musician, who had left the packed Read More …