Some fifty pages into his autobiography, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service” (Viking), Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), describes a moment of horror when he and...
In “Kitchen Confidential,” the book that launched Anthony Bourdain’s writing career, he explained that his subject was “street-level cooking and its practitioners.” Line cooks—the people actually making your food—“were the heroes,” he wrote. It was clear what kind...
In the last years of the nineteenth century, the social reformer Charles Booth set out to create a record of working-class life in Victorian London. “Life and Labour of the People in London,” as this undertaking was called,...
The best-loved Pixar movies are often spoken of in terms of their tried-and-true emotional impact, how reliably they reduce us to quivering lips and choked-back sobs, year after year, rewatch after rewatch. Sometimes a single inspired sequence can...
Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more...
Long Island, by Colm Tóibín (Scribner). Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant in New York whom Tóibín introduced in his novel “Brooklyn,” returns in this deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental sequel. The book, which takes place in the nineteen-seventies,...
The first time we meet Janet in “Janet Planet,” a wondrous début feature from the celebrated playwright Annie Baker, she is standing on a rural road a little way from the camera. The distance is subtle, but crucial....
In February, I attended a one-off screening at Metrograph of the 1987 film “Making Mr. Right,” in which a young John Malkovich—in one of his first movie roles—stars both as a taciturn scientist named Jeff Peters and as...
Even if I wanted to go back to Frog Club, I might not be allowed to. The mysterious restaurant, which opened a few months ago behind an unmarked door in the West Village, maintains a somewhat tongue-in-cheek code...
It didn’t take long for me to recognize the low bar awaiting me as a new father. In the early, bleary days of parenthood, I was congratulated for relaying the vaguest details of my son’s whereabouts and received...
