Each of the novellas that make up André Aciman’s new book, “Room on the Sea,” picks apart the intricacies of how people comprehend the feelings of others—or fail to. In this, they share something with many of the...
After the Civil War, the German-born Jewish businessman Isidor Straus moved with his family to New York City. Straus was enterprising and handsome, with small round spectacles, an angular nose, and a coarse, peppery beard. He started off...
Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” savors the potential fascination of reading authors whom posterity has cast aside: “One likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years...
Pancake Soufflé at Pitt’sIt’s arguable that this dish, the flagship dessert at chef Jeremy Salamon’s proudly kitschy Red Hook restaurant, isn’t actually a pancake: no pan, no cake. But it evokes pancakehood in an extraordinary way, by exploiting...
There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when the actor is conveying deep glee or charming irony as when his character...
The enterprising Tiler Peck has been a leading dancer at New York City Ballet for more than fifteen years, played a neurotic ballerina on Amy Sherman-Palladino’s “Étoile,” and created a number of ballets of her own. Now she...
In its nearly sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015, Maron interviewed the Saturday Night Live...
I think that sometimes, when we look at art, we’re hoping to recapture a piece of our past—a golden time when we had a deep and unforgettable experience with a painting, a photograph, or a drawing, when we...
Watch “The Candy Factory.”
Some forty years ago, Ann Ballentine, a real-estate agent with an eccentric sense of style and a knack for fostering community, bought a building in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I was first standing...
