Category Culture

The Beyoncé Grammys Were Awkward

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…

The Best Performances of 2022

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…

The Best Music of 2022

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…

The Best Jokes of 2022

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…

The Artist Who Collaborates with Ants

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…

The Age of Bathfluence

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…

Southern Exposure – The American Conservative

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…

Siena’s Medieval Cityscape – The American Conservative

The Loggia della Mercanzia. The arched structure was originallycompleted during the 15th century; the upper story dates to the 17th.Credit: Catesby Leigh Pictorial values in urbanism are typified by straight streets receding in perspective to their vanishing point on the…