There’s a self-portrait that shows Peter Hujar mid-leap. The picture is taken in a room, presumably in Hujar’s own East Village loft—at a time, 1974, when it was hard to imagine that the words “East Village loft” would...
It was a shock to learn that the writer Oğuz Atay was only forty-three years old when he died in 1977, of a brain tumor. The eight stories in “Waiting for the Fear,” first published in 1975 and...
Before becoming a chef, Purdie worked for a decade as a stylist at the late department store Henri Bendel, and on her lunch breaks she often went to a deli that had a ramen stand tucked in alongside...
This is an especially grim illustration of Pressly’s argument about how the production and the circulation of information can undermine our agency. The person targeted by the deepfake did not consent; neither did the masses of anonymous others...
James Ijames has three genres in mind for “Good Bones,” directed by Saheem Ali. First, it’s a haunted-house thriller: Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) walks around her new home—a restored manse shrouded in construction plastic—disturbed by unearthly laughter. Second,...
Last spring, a graduate student in social anthropology—let’s call him Chris—sat down at his laptop and asked ChatGPT for help with a writing assignment. He pasted a few thousand words, a mix of rough summaries and jotted-down bullet...
Early last year, on a slushy predawn morning, I drove to the Montana state capitol building, in Helena, to see the legislature in action. The body is made up of a hundred and fifty “citizen legislators” who meet...
At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya,...
If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of “hyper oxygenated” water will run you an unconscionable $25.99. It started, in...
