The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Shortly after I became pregnant with my second child, in the fall of 2022, I decided to try a modest experiment. I wanted to see whether I could hide my pregnancy…

The English Apple Is Disappearing

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In June, 1899, Sabine Baring-Gould, an English rector, collector of folk songs, and author of a truly prodigious quantity of prose, was putting the finishing touches on “A Book of the…

The Beautifully Unnerving Gaze of “Evil Does Not Exist”

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The Japanese writer and director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi operates in a key of seductively textured realism: present-day stories, crystalline images, unadorned performances, quotidian intimacies. And yet there are moments in his new…

Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-Comfort Movie

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story My Ghibli childhood, according to my mother, began when I was three. One day, seeing me and my sister bored and listless, she put aside some sheet music that she had…

“The Contestant” Is More Than a Cautionary Tale

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Tomoaki Hamatsu became one of the world’s first reality-TV stars when, as an aspiring comedian in his early twenties, he spent fifteen months naked and alone, surviving on sheer luck. The…