Culture

Nixon often divides the world into “thinkers” and “actors,” but she is an actor with a talent for channelling thinkers.PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAUDE MEDALE / CORBIS VIA GETTY When Cynthia Nixon was eleven years old, she auditioned for a workshop with…

Cy Twombly put so much effort into hiding his talents that it’s no wonder the art world took ages to appreciate them. Between the early fifties and his death, in 2011, he tried very hard to seem not to be…

Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, by Pete Hegseth with David Goodwin, (Broadside Books: June 2022), 288 pages. As we look at all the various forms of societal incompetence and unrest that currently afflict us, whether…

One of the great joys of downhill skiing is carving fresh tracks. The slopes are a skier’s canvas, one he returns to again and again, open each time to the distinct set of challenges and possibilities every new run offers.…

The internet was set abuzz with Camille Paglia’s name when two characters on HBO’s popular recent series The White Lotus appeared poolside reading a copy of her 1990 seminal tome Sexual Personae. It was only one of many recent examples…

Slowly, over several decades, woke values have come to shape ever more of the institutions we interact with daily. As I explore in my new book, How Woke Won, views that carry high status among a graduate, professional class now…

In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, many pundits predicted that a “red wave” of Republican victories would sweep across the country. There was precedent for this: historically, the President’s party tends to lose seats in midterm contests.…

The Benaim family dynamic—dark humor, frank talk, Teflon love—never ceased to delight Poler. “Growing up with them, I always thought, I wish I could document this,” he said. About a decade ago, the filmmaker Daniel Poler was living in his…

It’s not often that a body of photography is hoisted up from obscurity and straight into the canon. When this happens, the images in question are often the work of a self-taught master, such as the compendious Arkansas portraitist Mike…

On a Monday in late November, I had breakfast with Nick Wurst, a conductor on the C.S.X. railroad, at a diner in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts. We met before dawn, and Wurst, a bearded twenty-six-year-old, was wearing a…