Culture

If you ask experimental theatre about its intentions, you’ll usually hear about either revolution or radicality—something explosive. Even the term “avant-garde” is salvaged from the battlefield: when you’re struggling against realism, pieces are supposed to resist or defy or transgress.…

On May 9, 1966, the South African photographer Ernest Cole left Johannesburg for Europe, using a passport he’d secured under the pretext of making a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He’d sent a cache of his contact sheets out of the country…

These days, the Hell Gate Bridge, which connects the Astoria neighborhood of Queens with Randall’s Island, is one of the more obscure New York City bridges, appreciated mostly by those who know it for being a good fishing spot. This…

The writer-director hyphenate is the boon and the bug of independent filmmaking. Directors working with their own material are apt to create a more unified and personalized movie. But, because the writing of a script is mainly done at an…

It’s no surprise that we keep finding and building cool things. But the things that we find and build can still surprise us. 2022 was another year full of science and technology advances. It’s too soon to identify the most…

You would think that the most controversial claim made at the recent National Conservatism Conference—that the re-Christianization of American culture is the greatest hope for preserving the republic for future generations—would have been made by a Christian.  It wasn’t. It…

It’s hard to write both reasonably and responsibly about Olivia Wilde’s new film, “Don’t Worry Darling” (which opens Friday), because the movie gets much of its meaning from a plot twist, occurring midway through, that delightfully surprised me and that…

David Crosby, one of the most iconic and enduring voices of the nineteen-sixties, died last week, at the age of eighty-one. He was a founding member of the Byrds and of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (sometimes Crosby, Stills, Nash, and…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The artist David Choe first became known for his graffiti in the streets of Los Angeles, where he painted edgy, expressionistic murals in a mode he calls “dirty style.” For years,…

In a dimly lit basement in the Cambridge University Library, a conservator recently removed two reddish-brown, leather-bound notebooks from a moisture-controlled glass display case. The notebooks—one labelled “B” and the other “C”—belonged to the nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Darwin. In the…