James Hobson began publishing videos on YouTube in 2006, when he was still a high-school student in Ontario, Canada. His early uploads were crude by today’s standards—some gymnastics tricks, some parkour, and some mildly anarchic silliness (for example,...
A limousine is a kind of set; to enter one is to play a role, even without a camera present. “When people come into the car, everybody is dressed up, and you take on a new persona when...
I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long samurai sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from years of bodybuilding, his legs almost spindly by...
One of the stranger effects of Brexit was that, after the United Kingdom left the European Union, in 2020, it no longer recognized animals as “sentient beings.” When the U.K. was an E.U. member state, it was bound...
It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my...
The Delaunay, an upscale brasserie in London, sits on a crescent-shaped road called Aldwych, where the West End meets Fleet Street, the city’s historic home for newspapers. Situated at the intersection of entertainment and news, it is the...
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any visitors going to the Met’s exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying...
Whenever I hear the Arabic word mukhayyam, or camp, my mind leaps to Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza. I was born in Al-Shati refugee camp, a few miles away, but Jabalia was where my maternal grandparents were...
You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be transformed into a nursery for a baby due next month. Your late...
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen. Many readers addressed their fan letters not to the author, Betty Smith, but to her main character,...
