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 …
Like many young people who luxuriated in the possibilities of the nineteen-sixties, Irv Teibel wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life. Born in Buffalo, in 1938, he cast a wide net throughout his twenties, studying science Read More …
There’s a great story behind “Miles Davis and John Coltrane—The Final Tour,” the sixth volume in Sony’s “Bootleg Series” of live recordings by Davis (it comes out March 23rd), and that story makes itself heard in the music. In 1960, Read More …
Leading up to the première of the new season of “Roseanne,” back on TV after twenty-one years, so much had been made of the fact that the series’ matriarch, Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), was a gleeful Trump supporter, it appeared Read More …
Blood Orange’s album “Freetown Sound,” from 2016, is about the drama of returning home. For the artist Dev Hynes, who grew up in East London, this does not mean striving to be an authority on his father’s Sierra Leone but, Read More …
My husband died in May, the morning after his older brother’s wedding, in San Francisco. The wedding was a joyful celebration, the next morning its opposite. Peter was only thirty-nine. An autopsy revealed that he died from Loeffler’s endocarditis, a Read More …
In 1975, Loretta Lynn, by then an established country singer-songwriter for more than a decade, released her single “The Pill.” At that point, Lynn had won hearts and raised eyebrows with songs like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Read More …
Early in William Gibson’s novel “Pattern Recognition,” from 2003, Cayce Pollard, a highly paid professional “coolhunter,” wanders through a London department store. Pollard is hypersensitive to the semiotics of brands: when a product is lame, she feels it physically, as Read More …