The documentary short “To Be Invisible,” directed by Myah Overstreet, follows two young Black mothers, Alexis and Kellie, as they work to reunite their families. Alexis and Kellie have had children removed from their care, and must navigate...
In 2022, the singer and songwriter Lizzy McAlpine released her second studio album, “Five Seconds Flat,” a collection of winsome bedroom-pop songs about feeling heartsick and alienated. McAlpine, who was then twenty-two, seemed to fit neatly between Phoebe...
Authenticity is a feeling and investigative fervor is an attitude. The Italian neorealist classics bear the marks of the journalistic research on which they rely, but journalists rarely feature in the action. The whole truth of even an...
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....
