Remember the Trompe l’Oeil Sweatpants from Balenciaga? The nearly twelve-hundred-dollar heather-gray drawstring pants that seemed ordinary, innocent of fashion, until the shopper, scanning upward, caught the plaid trick happening at the waist—the idea. It was the suggestion of...
Rachel SymeStaff writerThere is little better, when the weather turns just chilly enough to necessitate a big scarf and a leather jacket, than to duck into a movie theatre to see a film that makes your blood run...
Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling,” a discursive, queasily romantic comedy about the emptiness of American celebrity, is back for another stint Off Broadway. At the Lucille Lortel, the director Neil Pepe is largely reprising his Atlantic...
Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of...
Over the last couple of months, a neighbor of ours has been upping her sign game. In addition to the usual stuff—“Law and Order,” “Not My President,” “No Legal Rights for Illegal Immigrants,” and so on—she’s added “Democrats...
The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (Norton). In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217,...
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-six, published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1961, and her final one two weeks ago, some sixty-three years later. Her earliest work for the...
Many of the photos he took during those early years appear in “The South Bronx Family Album.” In addition to Joey, who is pictured sitting cross-legged in a Buddha-like pose, wearing sunglasses and a loose-fitting knit tie, there...
Something’s bugging me about the way political happenings unfold these days. How do we—all of us who, during the past decade or so, have been baptized in the waters of public unreality—come to process passages of history which...
The journalist Sarah Smarsh grew up on a farm in rural Kansas, in “the sort of poverty that qualifies for welfare, though my proud family didn’t apply.” Her writing career, encompassing reporting, memoir, and opinion essays, has focussed...
