In 2009, after he had retired from his old career as a teen-age actor, and just as he was launching his new career as a grownup hip-hop star, Drake made a prediction: “When my album drop, bitches’ll buy...
As ever, Gray uses personal dramas to illuminate larger political realities. In the coming-of-age film “Armageddon Time,” he drew a direct connection from the racist policies of the Reagan era to the overt white supremacy of the Trump...
Midway through my watch of the new tech-satire series “The Audacity,” I received an e-mail from Google that I had received many times before. My personal data had been found online, it said. This time, it was my...
Like almost every smoker, I started when I was a child. Children aren’t supposed to smoke; it’s allegedly a part of the adult world, something you get inducted into once you turn eighteen. But everyone knows that the...
Other songs on “American Stories” are more personal. “Like a Spark” opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the appearance of a saz, a long-necked Turkish lute that’s omnipresent in Middle Eastern music....
When I first moved to Brooklyn, in 2010, a small, stapled, glossy print product became my guide to my new neighborhood of Bushwick and beyond. The L Magazine covered the hipster-ridden stretch of the L train into Williamsburg,...
Despite such philosophizing, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” can only superficially be called a movie of ideas; it’s a movie of strategies rather than of ideologies, of how power is used rather than why. Assayas takes a cynical...
I was eight, and through my bedroom wall I could hear my mother, Heidi, talking to herself as she prepared to go to sleep. Every night, in the living room, she positioned old magazines beneath the legs of...
“It starts from a very innocent place with Bear. I wanted it to be relatable. We’ve all had a crush on someone who didn’t like us back—which is kind of a creepy concept, when you think about it,”...
