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Over a fifth-anniversary dinner with my girlfriend recently, conversation turned to a mystery that has driven us both mad for almost the entire duration of our relationship. It is an image of a cartoon character, who appears on a clunky…

Old-fashioned corruption is the best-known method for running a city—works pretty good at the parish level, too. I know whereof I speak. I was born and raised in southern Louisiana, home to arguably the most corrupt politics in America. Mayor…

Two categories into last night’s Grammy Awards broadcast, Beyoncé found herself once again achieving an awkward status within the universe of the Recording Academy. For one, she was late to the ceremony—reportedly owing to traffic—and unable to collect a historic…

Performance is a kind of alchemy, so it’s rare that we get a controlled experiment that reveals how measurably it can swing a work of art. But that’s what happened this year, with the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” The…

I’ve never been particularly strategic about listening to new music; I tend to pursue it in arbitrary bursts or to let it float into my life in whichever way it can. I’m not even sure I could impose order over…

Political strategists on winning campaigns are visited like gurus after an election, with reporters looking to discern secrets of success that might be replicated at scale. In this spirit, in the days after the midterms, the Independent sought out Joe…

An installation view of Chalmers’s “Builders of Greatness.”Art work by Catherine Chalmers / Courtesy The Drawing Center: Photograph by Daniel Terna On her first trek through the rain forest, in 2000, the artist Catherine Chalmers noticed movement on the ground…

For the average home dweller, taking a bath used to be a private endeavor: fill a giant porcelain bowl with warm water, strip naked, submerge your corporeal form, rinse, repeat. The only people whose bath times were made public were…

If Oscar nominations bore a movie’s title, this year’s rundown would borrow one from Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, “Fear and Desire.” The movie-industry news of the past year has been the collapse of the box-office for almost everything but blockbusters,…

Prepping for a return visit to the attractive and prospering city of Greenville, South Carolina, I grabbed the only South Carolina travel book in our library system. An entry in the Moon series, it reassured Northern visitors that Greenville “is…