Last week, we heard that the small bookstore Westsider Books, on the Upper West Side, was closing its doors after thirty-five years. Saddened by the news, the artist Jenny Kroik went to Broadway and Eightieth to report on what was Read More …
One evening not long before the midterms, Igor Levit—a Russian-born pianist whose performances can be as intimate as a conversation and as forceful as his opinions—walked slowly onstage at Zankel Hall, deep below Seventh Avenue, and looked frankly into the Read More …
“How did you find us?” That’s what Angela Combrest, the press representative for the Chester Theatre Company, in Chester, Massachusetts, asked in response to my query about attending their season closer—a production of Annie Baker’s play “The Aliens.” It was Read More …
As long as critics are lifting their year-end songs of praise, I’d like to propose that the most formally inventive episode of television in 2018 was the fifth installment of “Co-Ed,” which consists of one long scene of a young Read More …
On Wednesday, the Academy Awards announced the comedian Kevin Hart as the host of this year’s broadcast. Apparently, he wasn’t the first person asked. The Hollywood Reporter had just run a piece headlined “Why Oscar Host Has Become the Least Read More …
Earlier this month, on the coldest day of the polar vortex in New York City, I met up with the sixty-one-year old actor Richard E. Grant, in the drab lobby of a Sheraton Hotel in downtown Brooklyn. Grant had recently Read More …
This past March, a small Catholic magazine called Women Church World ran an article titled “The (almost) free work of sisters.” In it, the journalist Marie-Lucile Kubacki described nuns who, among other menial tasks, serve meals to bishops and then Read More …
Christmas pop music can be an iffy, disingenuous genre—it’s not always motivated purely by the love of Christmas—yet sometimes we want to listen to it. For Christmas enthusiasts, X-pop can be a reminder of previous happy holidays or illuminate possibilities Read More …
There are many salient moments in “Lorena,” a four-part Amazon documentary series, released this week, which revisits the indelible story of Lorena Bobbitt and John Wayne Bobbitt a quarter century after it made international headlines. But it seems appropriate enough—in Read More …
“It’s good to be back in California,” Esa-Pekka Salonen said the other day, brewing an espresso in the kitchen of Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica. The Finnish composer and conductor led the Los Angeles Philharmonic for seventeen years, from Read More …