Category Culture

The news of a new Nobel Prize in Literature tends to divide amateur readers into two camps: those who have never heard of the author and those who have, vaguely. There are, of course, more familiar names that sometimes arise…

What’s exciting about the annual New Directors/New Films series, which runs through April 9th at MOMA and at Film at Lincoln Center, is the discovery of filmmakers, usually young ones, who pose new questions and seek new answers to the…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story   In the first thirty seconds of the director and artist Paul Trillo’s short film “Thank You for Not Answering,” a woman gazes out the window of a subway car that…

“Gathering” is the title of the Guggenheim’s triumphant Alex Katz retrospective (on view through Feb. 20), but it might easily have been “Conversations with Friends”—and not just because a stylish detail of a Katz double portrait graces the cover of…

Fall can be a bittersweet season. Even as we enjoy crisp air and changing leaves, the seasonally affected among us dread the shortening days. This year, there’s a long list of other anxieties: the spectre of nuclear threats from Putin,…

The headline of a New York Times column last week posed a simple question: “Why Do We Talk About Miscarriage Differently From Abortion?” To me, and I suspect many of you, the answer was obvious. Miscarriage is involuntary, elective abortion…

This was a year that was split into before and after—the dividing line being when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Following the shocking leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on May 2nd,…

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…