Is it possible to have a crush on a song? The way that I listen when I’m truly enthralled by a particular piece of music certainly feels like a crush—picking up the tone arm, hitting the back button, refreshing the Read More …

Click: We sticklers are in fine fettle (cliché!) this holiday season. One guy hates “’Tis the season,” and he’s right: ’tis overused. I get pedantic about the placement of the vocative comma in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” The song Read More …

As an experimental documentarian, I reimagine the function of archives for black women. There are stories the ancestors have buried, and I feel them scratching their way to the surface. Whether these archives have been erased or misplaced, I reconstruct Read More …

Popular on travel sites and guides today are grave tours through noteworthy cemeteries. Cemeteries have their own interesting architecture: in low-lying New Orleans, French settlers built St. Louis Cemetery with above-ground tombs, to protect against the encroaching sea. Today, visitors Read More …

On Sunday night, the Grammy Awards’ identity crisis entered a penitent “cool dad” phase. Last year, Neil Portnow, the longtime president of the Recording Academy, which produces the awards, put his foot in his mouth when a member of the Read More …

In August, 1968, Peter Bird Martin, a senior editor at Time magazine, persuaded the managing editor, Henry Grunwald, to schedule a cover story about Russell Baker. Baker’s wry, self-mocking New York Times column, “Observer,” was carried by scores of newspapers Read More …

“The opening of the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday evening seemed rather a social than a musical event,” a critic wrote in 1883, after the company’s inaugural performance. The same words apply to the Met’s hundred-and-thirty-fourth opening night, on September Read More …

The Queen of Soul required four days of mourning. The public viewing began on Tuesday. Aretha Franklin lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, in Detroit, a setting that befitted the transition occurring: the Read More …

This Saturday, at the Betty Cunningham Gallery, on Rivington Street, there will be a rare showing of Rima Yamazaki’s film “Rackstraw Downes: A Painter.” If it sounds like a documentary about Rackstraw Downes, it isn’t, although it is composed entirely Read More …

1 of 11 It’s that time of year again! The time when small ghouls, celebrities, and cultural references come to my door and demand candy from me. To be fair, they do offer me the option of doing a trick Read More …