Category Culture

State of the Union: Swift may be more “based” than conservatives give her credit for. Credit: Brian Friedman A few weeks ago, I retweeted a post by conservative commentator Michael Knowles that read, “Taylor Swift is temperamentally conservative, and the…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story One unusually warm January afternoon, I arrived in Cauterets, a small spa town in the Pyrenees, in southwest France, to meet the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin. There was a scattering of…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “Welcome, queer babies, to this reverse-conversion-therapy session! Our goal this evening is to make you queer.” It was a Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the playwright and…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The forty-year-old musician Chelsea Wolfe has roots in folk and country, but her music is imbued with the sonic weight of doom metal, with sludgy guitars and droning bass notes that…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Robert Cumming, a pioneering wizard of West Coast photo-conceptualism, died in 2021, at the age of seventy-eight. He achieved brief semi-stardom in the nineteen-eighties, when he mounted solo exhibitions at both…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “In the Know,” a new stop-motion comedy series on Peacock from Zach Woods, Brandon Gardner, and Mike Judge, begins with sounds familiar to any NPR listener: thoughtful hmm-ing, the performance of…

“Equity” and mendacity could go hand in hand when there are political points to be scored. Credit: gabriel12 In the last month, a Japanese airplane burst into flames on the tarmac after colliding with an American aircraft, a panel blew…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Watch Justin Fairweather’s “Roger J. Carter: Rebel Revolutionary.” One spring day in 2021, Justin Fairweather was driving around Los Angeles and stumbled upon an art exhibit of what appeared to be…

Keith’s unembarrassed patriotism made him a provocative throwback. Credit: Getty Images/ Credit: Rick Diamond Country music lost an icon this week. Toby Keith passed away Monday after a battle with stomach cancer. He was 62.  The Oklahoma native was a…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The epistolary novel, a literary genre that has included, among its entries, works like Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” has recently welcomed a new classic to…