By the final days of the Obama Administration, there was, among those inclined to recognize it, much warm feeling attached to the odd-couple bromance between the President and the Vice-President, Joe Biden. An image of the two men laughing in Read More …

In the nineteen-seventies, Richard Pryor mined his material—a trove of parody, mimicry, and mannerisms—from the chaos of America’s social scene. The poor and the nouveau riche, the conformists and the hipsters, the religious and the libertine: all were skewered alike. Read More …

The musical “Oklahoma!” was based, pretty much verbatim, on a play from 1930, “Green Grow the Lilacs,” by Lynn Riggs. The play’s opening in New York, at the Theatre Guild, was revved up by a group of cowboys that had Read More …

On a recent night, I was driving down Broadway when, a few blocks below Fourteenth Street, I spotted a large, showy sign above one of the storefronts. Though I’d never noticed it before, the outsized faces on it—printed in stark Read More …

In the early seventies, when Vince Aletti was a young music critic in New York, looking to make a name for himself, the biggest music magazines at the time—Rolling Stone, Creem—were dominated by coverage of white rock-and-roll acts. Aletti, who Read More …

Those poems that you notice on New York City subways and buses first appeared in 1992, as part of a collaboration between the Poetry Society of America and the M.T.A.’s New York City Transit Authority. This year was one of Read More …

1 of 15 There are so many stressful moments and fun distractions during the holiday season that it can be easy to forget what it’s really all about: using your hard-earned money to purchase goods and services that will stimulate Read More …

William Goldman, who died a week ago, had already written three Robert Redford movies when the actor contacted him in early winter of 1974 and asked him to write a fourth: an adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s forthcoming Read More …

I am writing this a day after my favorite sister’s birthday. She was very dear to me. She would have been sixty-nine this fall. She died two years ago, another casualty of M.S. and poor-black-girl-in-America life. My sister’s absence became Read More …

Between 1968, when Van Morrison released the intensely lyrical song cycle “Astral Weeks,” and 2016, when he released the alternately spry, contemplative, stubborn, and spiritual “Keep Me Singing,” the Northern Irish singer-songwriter put out more than thirty-five albums. That’s a Read More …