Category Culture

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…

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…

“We all grieve so differently,” the filmmaker Winter Dunn says. “And I think that, as adults, we forget that our children are experiencing their own process of grief that has nothing to do with you and has everything to do…

Though many excellent movies were released in theatres in 2022, most of them hardly registered on the Hollywood economic scale. In the current environment, few good movies are likely to make money the old-fashioned way, in theatres; meanwhile, the new-fashioned…

In the early nineties, I worked briefly as an assistant editor at Aperture, a job that involved considering unsolicited submissions of photographs. It was my good fortune that one such set of submissions was delivered to the office by the…

Isaac Childres was thirty-two years old when he started designing what is widely considered the best board game in the world. In 2015, he was living in Lafayette, Indiana, with his wife, Kristyn. Childres, who has a slight and somewhat…