Culture

Do you want to watch a movie or to live out a petit-bourgeois fantasy of Sardanapalan excess? (Photo by ClassicStock/Getty Images) The summer is upon us, and no one is going to the movies. Last weekend, the box-office charts were…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The title of Lyle Ashton Harris’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum, “Our First and Last Love,” is an abbreviated version of a fortune-cookie message: our first and last love is . . .…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story It was the most talked-about meal in the United States. In the weeks leading up to the luncheon, its organizers received so many requests for seats that they switched the venue…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Chris Wilcha’s new documentary, “Flipside,” is easy to summarize, but it defies summary nonetheless, because it advances by a lurching, associative method that leaves fault lines on the surface of its…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Rachel SymeStaff writer You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. Some people…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In the early twenty-tens, one cottage industry in digital journalism was the unmasking of Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a popular image or joke just as one…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In 1974, Martin Scorsese was a year removed from his breakthrough film—the semi-autobiographical “Mean Streets,” about a young man in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood who is sinking into the quicksand…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Watch “Compton’s 22.” When Drew de Pinto first learned about the Compton’s Cafeteria riot—in which a diner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district erupted in fighting between a group of trans women…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Elaine May became famous at twenty-five and rich soon thereafter, but it took her another decade to figure out what to do with her life, by which point she was too…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story For more than forty years, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical “Merrily We Roll Along” was a problem in search of a solution. Loosely based on a Kaufman and Hart play…