In 1952, a book appeared that redefined children’s literature. “A lap is so you don’t get crumbs on the floor,” it proclaimed. “A mustache is to wear on Halloween. A hat is to wear on a train.” The...
In 1992, a combination of drought, power outages, and escalating violence took a heavy toll on the nation of Colombia. “Bogotá Story” follows a young couple, living in the capital city, who must navigate their personal struggles and...
Back in July, the journalist Ezra Klein interviewed Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer at The Atlantic, on his popular podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.” Calabro had profiled Kamala Harris the previous year, and Klein wondered whether the...
In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically...
The first time I travelled outside of Gaza, I was twenty-seven years old. Growing up, I had always thought of “travel” as riding a taxi, bus, or bike within the borders of the Gaza Strip. My family lived...
Hilton AlsStaff writerThe ever-astonishing eighty-one-year-old vocalist, composer, theatre-maker, and performer Meredith Monk comes from a family of voices—four generations of singers—or one voice. Her mother was a talented commercial singer on the radio, but Monk chose a different...
With a certain liberal arrogance, many took a racist fabrication from Donald Trump at last week’s Presidential debate to be the evening’s crowning gaffe. In the Rust Belt town of Springfield, Ohio, “they’re eating the dogs. . . . They’re eating...
Charlotte Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. “I was a disaster on-screen: green, graceless, with a body too long and...
My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college, in the nineteen-seventies. She and my American dad divorced when I was small, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as...
