Category Culture

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…

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…