Category Culture

“The Idea of You” and the Notion of the Hot Mom

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The sandwiches clinch it. In Michael Showalter’s effervescent new movie, “The Idea of You,” Hayes Campbell, a twenty-four-year-old global pop star, is obviously attracted to Solène Marchand, a divorced, forty-year-old mom…

Who Wins and Who Loses When We Share a Meme

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story If you attended the 2019 Venice Biennale, you might have waited in a long line to see the prize-winning piece “Sun & Sea (Marina),” an opera performance staged by three Lithuanian…

Obituary: Alice Munro Reinvigorated the Short Story

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’ ” Alice Munro, who died on Monday, at age…

New Releases Make Old Jazz Young Again

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story By now, most of the great jazz artists from the mid-century crucibles of bebop and its avant-garde successors are gone, and most of the rest, in their eighties and nineties, have…

The View from Palestinian America

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In 1987, when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation in what would become known as the first intifada, I was six years old. Each evening, when Peter Jennings delivered the…

Restaurant Review: Blanca Is Not for Beginners

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. The day before your dinner at Blanca, you…

Looking at Art with Peter Schjeldahl

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “Cézanne doesn’t cut it.” When I heard Peter utter this sentence at a dinner party, I knew I was in over my head. Peter, at these dinners, where no one was…

Swimming with My Daughters

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story I went swimming with my two daughters when they were both expecting babies. The three of us had gone away for the weekend, and were staying at a hotel in Port…

The Beautiful Rawness of Steve Albini

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story This past Tuesday, May 7th, the engineer, producer, and musician Steve Albini died, of a heart attack, at his home in Chicago, where he has run a recording studio, Electrical Audio,…