“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees,” Terry Pratchett once wrote, and before I set about the carpentry of writing, with the dawning freakout of each new deadline, one of the books I return to...
No matter where we live, we all have to find ways to cope with increasing disruptions in weather patterns, including intense heat waves. For the cover of the July 1, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Klaas Verplancke depicts an...
There’s some quietly ferocious, fiercely expressive dialogue in the playwright Annie Baker’s first feature, “Janet Planet,” and several moments of imaginative sublimity. The movie is a passionate and finely nuanced view of the tense and powerful bond between...
The notion of having to one day repent for one’s trespasses gives even the godless a fright, we assume. A kicker like “You’ll regret this!” is redoubled by the certitude of a not-yet-felt emotion—how bad one will surely...
A new book, “Black Is Beautiful: JET Beauties of the Week” (powerHouse Books), collects some of the pictures that LaMonte McLemore, a vocalist and a founding member for the psychedelic soul band the 5th Dimension, took for Jet...
Just how far down did Moses go? The spiritual does not say, but one of the prophet’s namesakes—the woman who sang “Go Down, Moses” along the rivers and roads of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as she helped...
Guillaume de Machaut, the master poet-composer of fourteenth-century France, served for many years as the canon of the great Gothic cathedral at Reims, where the kings of the realm were crowned. Machaut’s most famous creation, the Messe de...
The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin (HarperVia). Set in a small town in northwestern Ireland in 1994, this finely wrought début novel depicts the limited options that were available to unhappily married women in that country prior to...
Catastrophic wars can start in peripheral places: Sarajevo, for the First World War; Gleiwitz, on the German-Polish border, for the Second. The contributors to “The Boiling Moat” (Hoover Institution), a short book edited by Matt Pottinger, believe that...
On Wednesday, Juneteenth, Kendrick Lamar threw himself a party. Dubbed “the Pop Out: Ken and Friends,” the concert—held at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles—served as a celebration of West Coast hip-hop, and a “victory lap” for Lamar...
