There’s little worse than watching a nervous actor onstage—especially when the poor guy isn’t just skittish but seems genuinely unprepared for the role that he’s playing. Incompetence has a way of unnerving its witnesses. An insecure performer robs...
In “The History of Sound,” a new romantic drama set during and after the First World War, passion is an intensely private thing, and in more ways than you might expect. Love and desire are not simply expressed...
In the past year, the actor Mark Hamill—best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the original “Star Wars” trilogy—has starred in not one but two adaptations of works by Stephen King: “The Life of Chuck” (2024) and “The...
I live in a three-generation household. My wife and I, our son and daughter, and my in-laws share a single house in the Long Island suburbs. Our place is big, but crowded: all of us have hobbies, and...
When the news is especially distressing, it can be easy to feel like art is futile; that you should, instead, focus your attention on all the suffering in the world, such as the cruelties inflicted by the second...
I ran these notions by Arlan Andrews, a retired mechanical engineer and author who is the founder and director of SIGMA, a think tank of sci-fi writers that advises the government and N.G.O.s. He responded by throwing up...
Mid-pandemic, I was speaking with a semi-stranger at a playground where our children were playing semi-together. Her son, maybe six or seven years old, could effortlessly hitch himself up to the top of the park’s lampposts. On seeing...
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.Jeff Tweedy is best known as the front man of Wilco,...
One of the key works of the modern cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy,” from 1954—starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a British couple whose travels around Naples expose their suppressed conflicts—taught the era’s filmmakers that, with...
