Category Culture

When Steven Soderbergh announced, in 2011, that he was about to retire from movies and devote himself to painting, I didn’t believe it. Not that I considered him deceitful; rather, I thought, judging from the evidence onscreen, that he loved…

How to walk properly, according to Lorraine O’Grady, the eighty-eight-year-old conceptual and performance artist: “With your chin tucked under your head, your shoulders dropped down, your stomach pulled up.” Good posture has become a concern for O’Grady in the past…

LIV Golf, the first serious challenge to the PGA’s monopoly on professional golf, has drawn the media’s ire for its Saudi investors. The firestorm has involved the same feigned hysteria the American public endures in each news cycle. If you’re…

Grammy Award-winning rap and pop artist Lizzo had a surprise guest appearance at her concert in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday night.  No, it wasn’t rappers Cardi B or Missy Elliot—it was President James Madison’s 200 year old crystal flute. Video…

In the fall of 2015, I moved from Brooklyn to Vermont for a month to try to write something new. I had spent four years working on a novel—four years covering cocktail napkins with notes about the tiniest interpersonal dynamics…

Spoiler alert: the climactic event of “Knock at the Cabin” is a book burning. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that, lest anyone deem Hollywood a solid front of liberal messaging, this new film by M.…

You may have seen the recent meme involving the phrase “the feminine urge to,” followed by some pithy example of melancholy or chaotic behavior. “The feminine urge to stop replying to texts and sit in solitude for months at a…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In 2003, Ken Jennings was a twenty-nine-year-old software engineer, living in a suburb of Salt Lake City with his wife and young son, when his old college roommate suggested that they…

When we begin “The U.S. and the Holocaust”—a six-and-a-half-hour, three-part documentary about America’s actions during one of history’s greatest atrocities, the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews—we find ourselves in 1933 Frankfurt, where a bourgeois German-Jewish family is going out…

In recent years, on Instagram and in fashion magazines, a girl-centric aesthetic has taken hold. Young photographers such as Petra Collins, Olivia Bee, and Mayan Toledano have been capturing the private rites and practices of adolescents—in school, at parties, on…