Category Culture

Most afternoons, around 4:30 P.M., a pair of words, separated by a comma and followed by an exclamation point, pops into my head; sometimes I say them aloud. The first, a profane four letters beginning with “F,” is not worth…

The capital of South Korea makes a good first impression, not least with its infrastructure. This May, Seoul’s ever-expanding subway system opened another addition, an extension of the Shinbundang Line that connects four existing stations. The northernmost, Sinsa, lies in…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story There is a point in Jean-Christophe Klotz’s documentary “Filmmakers for the Prosecution” when the producer Sandra Schulberg describes emptying out the New York City loft where her mother, Barbara, lived until…

The end of the pandemic in New York has been declared so many times—I have heralded many a false spring myself—and each time with a stumbling, unhappy one-step-forward, one-step-back rhythm, that to declare it over for good feels squishy and…

Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” And yet, strangely, he didn’t go on to become a painter or a playwright or an operatic tenor. He went into politics. I’m sure Breitbart meant it at the time. At some…

Over a fifth-anniversary dinner with my girlfriend recently, conversation turned to a mystery that has driven us both mad for almost the entire duration of our relationship. It is an image of a cartoon character, who appears on a clunky…

Old-fashioned corruption is the best-known method for running a city—works pretty good at the parish level, too. I know whereof I speak. I was born and raised in southern Louisiana, home to arguably the most corrupt politics in America. Mayor…

Two categories into last night’s Grammy Awards broadcast, Beyoncé found herself once again achieving an awkward status within the universe of the Recording Academy. For one, she was late to the ceremony—reportedly owing to traffic—and unable to collect a historic…

Performance is a kind of alchemy, so it’s rare that we get a controlled experiment that reveals how measurably it can swing a work of art. But that’s what happened this year, with the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” The…

I’ve never been particularly strategic about listening to new music; I tend to pursue it in arbitrary bursts or to let it float into my life in whichever way it can. I’m not even sure I could impose order over…