Category Culture

What is a Woman? – The American Conservative

A woman, as it turns out, is actually a very difficult thing to define. Contra savvy conservative pundits, the meaning doesn’t just evade gender studies majors at Harvard but also straight white men, middle class women, and backwoods hillbillies. And…

Turning YouTube Comments Into Art

If written today, “In Search of Lost Time” might well be an Internet novel. The Web has become the first port of call in any search for what we’ve once seen or even felt. It’s our externalized memory—in the never-fading…

Tom Stoppard Faces His Family’s Past

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the play that made Tom Stoppard’s name, in 1966, begins with a perfect stage image: Ros and Guil, those identikit functionaries borrowed from “Hamlet,” are passing the time by flipping coins. Their fate having been…

Tina Barney’s Searching Early Work

The photographs that Tina Barney calls “The Beginning” (which form the basis of a show at the Kasmin gallery through April 22nd) are set in a marina and on a golf course, in private pools and on broad summer lawns,…

Things I’ve Seen, by Patti Smith

On March 20, 2018, the spring equinox, I posted my first Instagram entry. My daughter, Jesse, had suggested that I open an account to distinguish mine from fraudulent ones soliciting in my name. Jesse also felt the platform would suit…

The Untouchable Tina Turner

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story On Wednesday, one of the great American voices—gritty, vehement, tender, and red-hot, containing, somehow, both the entire history and future of rock and roll—went silent. Tina Turner, who was born Anna…

The Unbearable Blandness of “Barney”

The new documentary “I Love You, You Hate Me” uses Barney to examine a broader phenomenon.Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty  What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and nineties kids’-TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? Was it…