The northern spotted owl is about a foot and a half high, with very dark eyes, a greenish beak, and a rim of feathers, called a facial disk, that makes it appear to be regarding the world with...
There was a time not too long ago when “Willem de Kooning and Italy,” at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, would have had fans back in the U.S. gnashing their teeth. We are talking, after all, about the...
Early in “The Welkin,” the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s period thriller, now at the Linda Gross Theatre, a dozen women appear in something like an eighteenth-century diorama: they are arranged in bas-relief against a black curtain, each obsessively...
Movies that rely on symbolism usually do so through conspicuous artifice, whether that of high style (Hitchcock, Hawks, Wes Anderson) or of rigorous reserve (Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais). But in “Naked Acts,” the first and (to date) only...
In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020, when the pandemic created a spike in demand for...
During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at the University of Washington started noticing something strange in the college’s experimental forest. For years, a blight of caterpillars had been munching the trees to death. Then, suddenly, the caterpillars...
Hey, Zoey, by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown). What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel,...
Saddam Hussein was known for many qualities, but subtlety was not among them. An oft-repeated anecdote relates that, during a cabinet meeting, he floated the idea of stepping down as Iraq’s President, and his minister of health agreed...
