We don’t always get to choose our dining companions. What’s the right move when you’re seated next to a boor at a restaurant to which you’d like to return? —Anonymous, BrooklynHelen, Help Me!E-mail your questions about dining, eating,...
According to the script, the title of the latest play by Dominique Morisseau is “Bad Creole Kreyòl.” We go with the simplified “Bad Kreyòl”—the language of Haiti written in its language, rather than its gallicization—because how can you...
When I think of Dorothy Parker’s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. A sunken battleship resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, the Arizona is slowly leaking oil...
It’s commonplace to acknowledge Clint Eastwood as one of the most distinctive and original political filmmakers. What’s surprising about his new film, “Juror #2,” is that the politics it brings to life is essentially, and forcefully, anti-political. It’s...
Not long ago, I saw an article that would have both delighted and exasperated the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. “Entrepreneurs are planning autonomous ‘charter cities’ as an answer to Africa’s population growth,” a passage read. The article,...
This summer, I bought my wife a vintage watch—a model called the Big Crown Pointer Date, made by the Swiss company Oris. The watch was manufactured in 1995, and is small, elegant, and mechanical, which means that it...
Nasar Ghafoor looks healthy and vibrant, but he has mortality on his mind. Ghafoor started a family late in life, and fears that he won’t be there to see his four young children grow up. The average life...
Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes into my recent lunch with Eisenberg, in Chelsea, I had yet to ask him a question, but he’d peppered...
A feeling of impending doom hovers over many of Nasseri’s pictures. On the first day of the road trip, which happened to fall on the Fourth of July, Nasseri and a friend arrived in Bishop, California, a small...
In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a young...
