December’s so dramatic. For weeks, the days darken—a quickening fade that suggests a coming show. It’s depressing to leave home around four-thirty and realize the sun’s already set. But the darkness has its clarifying benefits. One of my...
The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2024. The magazine’s writers also made their way through many other books—novels they had missed upon publication,...
Can the art of opera ever escape the suffocating grip of its magnificent past? Judging from the striking array of contemporary works that reached American stages in the past year, we might be closer to that goal than...
Those of us in the admittedly absurd position of eating for a living come to learn, after some time on the job, that, on balance, most food tends to be pretty good. Of the hundreds of restaurant dishes...
In November, the reality star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian posted a series of images and videos to her social-media accounts, in which she appeared to promote Tesla’s new A.I. robot, Optimus. In a video on X, captioned “Meet...
Brian SeibertSeibert has covered dance for Goings On since 2002.New York dance in December is all about “The Nutcracker,” the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and the joy they both bring. But the Ailey company’s encampment at City...
Download a transcript.Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.2024 in ReviewNew Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis...
The two most daring and accomplished American movies of the year are also, at first glance, the most dissimilar. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” stunningly drawn from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, sustains a rigorous first-person perspective—toggling between...
I had my worst-ever packing experience in the late nineties, when I was a teen-ager. My mother and I were returning from a trip to Ireland. Before leaving home, we’d overpacked extravagantly, imagining a wide range of non-rainy...
Rental House, by Weike Wang (Riverhead). Filled with both the comedy and the bitterness of miscommunication, this pointed, deadpan novel examines an intercultural couple’s marriage. Keru is a first-generation Chinese American; Nate is the product of working-class Appalachia....
