Joan Baez, yet another famous fan, emerges as one of the diary’s recurrent characters, and a kind of guiding spirit for this metamorphosis. She enters his orbit after a mutual friend informs Fauci that she is now “an...
Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway (New Directions). This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns...
When I first heard “Get Lucky,” by Daft Punk, in the summer of 2013, I was completely, pleasantly disoriented by it. It was new and shiny, but at the same time it instantly threw me back to the...
When I first heard “Get Lucky,” by Daft Punk, in the summer of 2013, I was completely, pleasantly disoriented by it. It was new and shiny, but at the same time it instantly threw me back to the...
When the Eras Tour started, in 2023, Swift had been at war with the shadowy entities that owned her recordings—first, the bosses of her former label Big Machine Records, then the mogul Scooter Braun, who bought Big Machine,...
There’s a YouTube video I love of Glen Hansard standing on a rainy street in Dublin, wearing a black jacket and a scarf, cradling a guitar that shows signs of wear, which was something of a Hansard signature....
Murashige, though hardly a mental slouch, is stymied by these events, and with each new case he winds up turning to Kanbei’s superior tactical mind for help. The prisoner thus becomes the detective, albeit with shackles and a...
Sheila Heti—whose new story “Earthly Delights,” about the mysteries of lust, appears in this week’s issue—wrote one of my favorite books ever: “Motherhood.” The narrator is in her thirties, watching her fortieth birthday tick closer and trying to...
One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s great gifts as a writer was her ability to reconnect, at age sixty-three and beyond, with her childhood sense of wonder and discovery. For readers of her autobiographical “Little House” books, it is...
This strategy of manufacturing a froth of interest around a given subject, from Nicki Minaj’s political perspectives to Sydney Sweeney’s jean ads, has recently been especially effective, and has moved culture-war fights from the trenches of bot-infested social...
