I’m Donut ?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty is the nama doughnut (the word, in Japanese, means...
One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to make of the feelings...
Decades later, in the eighties, we meet Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a bespectacled, dark-haired teen-ager, growing up in what is now the German Democratic Republic. She casts longing glances toward the river—West Germany, and a different life,...
When the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi was growing up, her grandmother, Leman Ypi, would tell her that during her honeymoon—which took place in Italy in 1941, when war raged throughout Europe and at the edges of the...
On October 24, 2025, the actor and director Christopher Guest took the stage for a discussion with the New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, as part of The New Yorker’s 26th annual Festival, a weekend of conversations, screenings,...
I don’t think I viscerally understood the importance of a Christmas tree, or a Hanukkah menorah, or a St. Lucia’s crown until I moved into an apartment with lots of windows: the night is long and dark out...
This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband’s much grander vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,” she writes, in “Two of Me,” of visiting Francis...
Kader Attia’s film “La Valise Oubliée” (2024) cracks open a well of family memories, employing photographs and archival materials buried in three suitcases to unpack stories about the history of the Algerian independence struggle. The question of cultural...
