Category Culture

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…

Alain Locke is remembered as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance largely for assembling “The New Negro,” a 1925 anthology that immortalized a small group of young writers—Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and others—as America’s first…

The trailer for this week’s episode of “Succession” promised another set-piece Roy wedding—this time that of Connor Roy, the eldest and oftenest-overlooked of Logan Roy’s four children, and his ever-blonder, ever more couture-clad bride-to-be, Willa. The setting: a yacht in…

The pediatrician and entrepreneur Harvey Karp is the most famous baby calmer in the world. To new parents, he is something between a sage and a magician, offering insight into the opaque miseries and motivations of the tiny humans newly…

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…