Category Culture

The Best Diners Are Still Just Diners

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. I always read the whole menu at a…

Immigration Irony

State of the Union: A 400 person brawl broke out outside a New York City migrant center when one migrant attempted to skip the line. The border is in complete chaos. So much so that New York City Mayor Eric…

Barry Blitt’s “Back to the Future”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story As the New Year unfolds—an election year, at that—we can safely predict it will be filled with revelations and drama, even when it will surely contain some elements of déjà vu.…

The Legend of the Selmer Mark VI

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The harmonics of the saxophone concentrate around similar frequencies as the human voice. When you play it, the shape and size of your mouth and throat contribute to the resulting tone.…

The Secret Fuel That Makes “Ferrari” Such a Triumph

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Half of life is spent dealing with details: the numbers, the paperwork, the dozens of discussions upon which any shared activity, professional or private, is based. (The other half of life…

The Many Lives of Vinie Burrows

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story When the actor and activist Vinie Burrows died, on December 25, 2023, surrounded by her family, she was ninety-nine. She had lived at least five lives. In the course of nearly…

A Sleater-Kinney Album Mutated by Grief

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Like many great recording studios, Flora Recording & Playback, in Portland, Oregon, is unspectacular from the outside. A brick building situated on a moderately busy street in between two residential neighborhoods,…

The Eps-Files

A new batch of unsealed documents holds new puzzles for those who want to believe. Unsealed by a federal court in New York: The first two tranches of documents pertaining to Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against the now deceased financier and…

Hittite America

I looked into the Bronze Age and found it eerily familiar. Credit: Carole Raddato When I was in college, I took a graduate-level seminar on the language of the Hittites, a Bronze Age people of Anatolia. I was interested in…

Anatomy of Another Fall

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story When the French director Justine Triet’s first feature, “Age of Panic,” screened in New York—in 2014, the year after its Cannes première—it felt as if the movie might herald a new…