Labor-saving technology tends to create domestic systems that are far more efficient over all, but not necessarily easier for the people doing the labor. As the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote in “More Work for Mother: The Ironies...
Mary Kay had tried her hand at direct, door-to-door sales before. She was once enchanted with a Depression-era racket called the “Child Psychology Bookshelf”: badly printed, seldom-used encyclopedias filled with moral tales, sold on installment plans to poor...
On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died at Jonestown, the agricultural settlement they had founded in a remote part of northern Guyana. Many, in answering the call to “revolutionary suicide,” drank...
Celan’s influence is tricky to absorb for any poet who did not suffer in a labor camp or witness his parents taken away to be murdered by the S.S. It is impossible to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from...
Amant, the sprawling four-building, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot campus where Zoli lives, is the project of Lonti Ebers, a serious art collector and a MOMA trustee married to the Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt. The space opened, in 2021, to real notice...
Shortly after the conclusion of the fourth season of the Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things,” in 2022, one of the series regulars, Joe Keery, released “Decide,” his second album as Djo. His career as a musician largely existed in...
The undercurrent of unsatisfied lust that runs through “Élisabeth” bursts to the fore when Michel, giving a high-school student named Jacqueline a lift, introduces himself under a false name and then unhesitatingly dares, as she later says, to...
The people closest to us can sometimes be the hardest to see clearly—and mothers might be the blurriest. “The mother-daughter relationship, perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view,” Rachel Aviv writes in...
Everything is watching you. The snakes, of course, along with the birds, bears, turtles, fish, rabbits, and horses. Also: the tables, the chairs, the bridges, the tents, the rocks, the plants, the trees, the trucks, the boats, and...
