Ray Johnson, a master of the collage, made work that was cryptic, obsessive, and densely allusive. It was Pop before the style had a name; his appropriated Elvis images predate Warhol’s. But Johnson’s pieces were intimate and insinuating, not imposing,…
The film’s eight minutes of conversation, drawn from five hours of recordings, offer a glimpse of a parent treating his adult child as a peer in candid exchanges. “The only regret about feeling like a man is I’m not really…
The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century, by Bedross Der Matossian, (Stanford University Press: March 2022), 360 pages. In August 1909, the Ottoman government in Istanbul replaced Zihni Paşa, the sitting Vali, or governor, of…
In the second hour of the three-part Hulu docuseries “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence,” several students who had their lives and their potential wrung out by Larry Ray, a manipulative ex-convict, recall the moment that they decided…
The rapport of the married voice actors Julian Barratt and Julia Davis helps dramatize the power struggle they perform. Daniel Robert Hope is skeptical by nature. The filmmaker and animator remembers reading “A Sighting,” a couple of years ago, a…
“Childhood Lover Arrives Back in Town After 8 Years.” That’s how N Recaps, a YouTube movie-summary channel, describes “Persuasion,” the new film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, directed by Carrie Cracknell, which is now streaming on Netflix. Using narration…
Spain’s monasteries offer exquisite examples of the faded glamor of godly things. In the Cistercian Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Oseira in northwestern Spain, I passed from one outdoor cloister beautifully overrun with purple lavender flowers to another…
I first heard the jazz singer Paula West’s début album, “Temptation,” not long after it came out, in 1997, and it gave me the conviction that adulthood might be an interesting place to live. I was barely thirteen, but the…
Last month, a YouTube user named demonflyingfox uploaded a video titled “Harry Potter by Balenciaga.” It showed characters from the Harry Potter films—Hagrid, Ron, Hermione, Snape, McGonagall, Dobby—as gaunt models with aggressive cheekbones (slightly yassified), dressed in gothic capes and…
Four years ago, I spent a morning cooking couscous with my grandmother Denise near Grenoble, France, where she has lived most of her life. We peeled carrots and turnips, seared lamb and chicken, tied bouquets of herbs, and mixed hot…