Category Lifestyle

Remembrances of Queer Auteurs Past

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story “Welcome, queer babies, to this reverse-conversion-therapy session! Our goal this evening is to make you queer.” It was a Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the playwright and…

Chelsea Wolfe’s Eclectic Hauntings

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The forty-year-old musician Chelsea Wolfe has roots in folk and country, but her music is imbued with the sonic weight of doom metal, with sludgy guitars and droning bass notes that…

A Pioneering Wizard of West Coast Photo-Conceptualism

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Robert Cumming, a pioneering wizard of West Coast photo-conceptualism, died in 2021, at the age of seventy-eight. He achieved brief semi-stardom in the nineteen-eighties, when he mounted solo exhibitions at both…

Donald Trump’s Chaos, Straight to Your In-Box

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The epistolary novel, a literary genre that has included, among its entries, works like Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” has recently welcomed a new classic to…

“Perfect Days” and the Perils of Minimalism

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Fantasy comes in many forms, and one of them arises when a work of scrupulous realism strains plausibility to the point that it plays like mere wish fulfillment. The German director…

The Dark Delights of a Millennial “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In the opening minutes of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”—Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s minor-key remix of the 2005 film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as married, duelling assassins—the series symbolically…

Nicholas Konrad’s “Online Profile”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Early in 1925, Harold Ross set out to revolutionize “the humorous magazines of the country,” which, in his mind, “weren’t very funny, or meritorious in any way.” Ross and his wife,…