In 1937, Orson Welles had a strange run-in with Ernest Hemingway. The future director of “Citizen Kane,” who was then twenty-two, was recording voice-over for the documentary “The Spanish Earth,” a Spanish Civil War film for which Hemingway and John Read More …

“Random Acts of Flyness” (HBO) is an ineffably wonderful late-night variety show—an urgent collage of short films and sketches that incorporates and commingles animation, documentary, confession, satire, music video, and magic-realist fantasia. It’s a comedy show, too, if you like Read More …

Like the pop album before it, the structural unity of the “S.N.L.” episode is in flux, its wholeness disturbed by social media’s love of fragments. This can be a good thing. To the delight of comedy nerds, the lid that Read More …

“My Brilliant Friend” (HBO), an eight-hour miniseries adapted from the first of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, opens as the book does, with a telephone ringing in the dead of the night. Elena Greco, the book’s narrator, answers it to learn Read More …

On October 1st, Charles Aznavour, the world’s last and greatest troubadour, was found dead in the bath at his home in the small village of Mouriès, in southern France. He was ninety-four. Aznavour’s career spanned nearly eighty years, at least Read More …

I wrote my first story in a university library, in Boston. It was 1978, and I was bored to death with structuralism and post-structuralism. I wrote with a cheap ballpoint pen in the exercise book that I used for lecture Read More …

Every death erases a uniqueness. But to say that there was no one on earth like Francine du Plessix Gray is to state a simple and obvious truth. There were three cultural—call them national—streams in her existence: French by birth Read More …

Maya Rudolph can, with just a look, convey the sudden onset of total despair. In perhaps her most famous scene, in the movie “Bridesmaids,” her character, beset by food poisoning, defecates in the middle of the street while wearing a Read More …

Loretta Lynn once dreamed of putting together an all-woman backing band, called the Lynettes. But it never happened. “It was that old double standard again,” she explains in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the memoir, published in 1976, that she named after Read More …

When I was seven or eight years old, my mother’s father, Gene Ellis, bought a large pontoon boat, which he docked at a remote cove on Kaw Lake, not far from the small town where we lived, Ponca City, Oklahoma. Read More …