In 1994, Townes Van Zandt recorded a muscular, defiant song called “Blaze’s Blues.” It was a lament for his friend, the late folksinger Blaze Foley, who took a bullet to the gut in a driveway in Austin, Texas, in 1989. Read More …

One of my favorite moments in all of music is from the album “Songs of Faith,” which Aretha Franklin recorded live, in 1956, at the New Bethel Baptist Church, in Detroit, when she was barely fourteen years old. Having already Read More …

In the days since his loss to Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race, Beto O’Rourke has not fallen into a twilit, Nordic funk, except in one respect. Here is how he begins a blog post he published on Medium Read More …

This film is a collaboration between The New Yorker and Retro Report. Operation Ceasefire, an audacious approach to reducing gang-related violence that was developed by David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was still largely unproven Read More …

There are thirteen hundred and forty-eight names on the winter register of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association, a voluntary organization for “women who care about the pond,” the pond being a small, women-only swimming hole in London’s Hampstead Heath. According Read More …

Last month, Columbia Records hosted a listening session for “Come Over When You’re Sober, Part 2,” the posthumous album from Lil Peep, the rapper and singer who died tragically, last year, of a drug overdose at age twenty-one. On the Read More …

Rationality has lost its currency. The people in charge are dolts—masters of manipulation making testosterone-fuelled, incendiary moves on the world stage. Patriotism has soured into ugly, gun-loving nationalism, with brown people and foreigners the targets of a nonsensical, hateful rage. Read More …

The new Netflix documentary “The American Meme,” directed by Bert Marcus, offers a chilling glimpse into the lives of social-media influencers, tracking their paths to online celebrity, their attempts to keep it, and their fear of losing it. Early on Read More …

When Edie Falco discusses her relationship with James Gandolfini, with whom she created one of the most complex and moving portraits of marriage ever shown on television, she sometimes admits that the two didn’t know each other very well. She Read More …

The New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein is live-drawing the 2019 Oscars from a wonderful vantage point right in front of his television. This post will update throughout the night as the Academy Awards winners are announced. 11:23 p.m. 11:10 Read More …