Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian singer who performs as the Weeknd, is perhaps his generation’s most committed self-mythologist. Early in his career, he obscured his identity while his moody, debased mixtapes became cult favorites. These early recordings presented a...
One night in January, 2002, during the initial theatrical run of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” a friend and I, students at the University of Southern California, drove up toward the Hollywood Hills to seek out the road itself....
As genres go, Italian still-life painting isn’t a ghost town, exactly, but it evokes more than its share of dust and tumbleweeds. It’s just a fact that French fruit bowls and Dutch lemon peels get a bigger chunk...
There’s traditional luxury to be had, if you’re looking for that sort of thing—a truffle-laden pasta special one night, toast soldiers piped with foie-gras mousse and topped with a jiggly squish of Sauternes jelly on another. But there’s...
This past fall, the artist FKA Twigs promoted her then forthcoming album, “Eusexua,” with a series of international raves. Londoners were told to meet her at the Cause, Angelenos at the Reserve, New Yorkers at the Chocolate Factory....
“Low Tide,” 2023.
Photograph by Mary Mattingly / Courtesy Robert Mann GalleryMary Mattingly’s photographs of moonlit gardens turn the Robert Mann gallery into a hallucinatory hothouse. Vivid and wild with masses of real, handmade, and computer-generated flowers, Mattingly’s compact...
In 1970, six years into Brazil’s military dictatorship, Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing politician, returned to the country after years of self-imposed exile. Not long after setting up home in Rio de Janeiro with...
When the filmmaker Azadeh Navai was five years old, her mother took her to have her photo taken for an I.D. And, before she knew it, a scarf was placed over Navai’s head and tied under her chin....
Being wrong puts off neither prophets nor their followers. The term “cognitive dissonance,” coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the nineteen-fifties, described an imbalance between conviction and information. He had been studying a cult led by Dorothy...
For the cover of the February 3, 2025, issue, the artist Kadir Nelson captured the emotion he experienced when, walking downtown, he startled a flock of pigeons. “I felt that a painting of birds in flight might summon...
