See the article in its original context from January 16, 2000, Section 6, Page 44Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. It's not easy for a writer in New York to emanate an aura of mystery. Being reclusive helps -- or, short…
Juan B. Ramírez
Shouts & Murmurs June 25, 2018 Photograph by Jochen Tack / Alamy Before I pioneered writing personal essays about quitting things, people simply quit things and maybe told their friends and family about it. They didn’t quit things as fodder for an overlong essay that seventy-four people will read on…
What I didn’t understand yet is that Lent concentrates guilt, then cathartically explodes it — it’s a kind of intermissionless Bergman matinee that leads you stumbling back across the parking lot beneath the newly blinding sun. By depriving you of just one vanity, just one of the many little…
View Full Images I think once there is conventional wisdom or received ideas in the press or there is unanimity, you’ve got a disaster.RENATA ADLER Last year when New York Review Books republished Renata Adler’s two novels, 1976’s Speedboat and 1983’s Pitch Dark, generations who hadn’t been around…
Jen Fein ruminates on everyday ephemera: allegedly bulletproof taxi partitions, for example, or the enigma of the “self-addressed envelope,” or bizarre form letters. In company, she is drawn as if by hypnosis to the flaw, and, implicitly, the void. Attuned to the wrong word, the malapropism, the…
Were circumstance, or accident, contrive to have you flick through the 4 July 1964 issue of the New Yorker, there is a chance you might notice, sitting between the columns of text on page 71, what is,
Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here’s why we do it, and how to stop. *** How can we stop wasting time on unimportant details? From meetings at work that drag on forever without…
A Children’s Bible David L. Ulin The reunion apocalypse: a new novel from Lydia Millet. A Children’s Bible: A Novel, by Lydia Millet, W. W. Norton, 224 pages, $25.95 • • • How did Lydia Millet know? “Diseases are migrating fast these days,” a character warns in the middle of her eleventh novel, A…
If it turns out to resemble fact, well, that's not that the line is thin, is it? I don't know why, but I keep coming back lately in my head to Henry James and The Princess Casamassima. I wonder how he knew what he knows, and I wonder how he was prescient about a certain kind of political reality.…
Columns “Sleep to Dream” is the first track on Fiona Apple's 1996 triple-platinum debut, Tidal, which turns 20 this weekend. It is also a fight song like no other—a demand to be taken seriously, by an artist who sometimes isn't. July 22, 2016 Graphic by Noelle Bullion “Now, when I listen to your…
The New Yorker Interview A conversation with the author and activist about class, reporting, the coronavirus, and socialism. March 21, 2020 Photograph by Jared Soares for The New Yorker Barbara Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, where her family had lived for generations, in 1941. Most of her…
Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Lonely people feel the need for company, while solitary types seek to escape it. The neatest definition of loneliness, David Vincent writes in his superb new study, is “failed solitude”. Another difference between the two groups is that hermits, anglers,…
Q. & A. March 17, 2020 “It’s about contributing your own personal discomfort or inconvenience to protect yourself and to protect others,” Asaf Bitton says, of social distancing.Source Photograph by Joan Mateu / AP As Americans and people around the world are being asked to help halt the spread of…
My grandmother was a treasure. Outside of my parents, Ruth French (“Nana” to us) was the single most influential person in my life. She was a history teacher from rural Mississippi. She was widowed in middle age (I never met my grandfather; he died in a tractor accident when my Dad was still in…
Artigo Cinema Correndo atrás de Si-mesmo: em ‘Joias Brutas’, o indivíduo esbarra no coletivo Assim como Elaine May, o cinema dos irmãos Safdie busca construir figuras masculinas em constante conflito com a idealização de si-mesmos Maicon Firmiano da Silva - 3 de fevereiro de 2020 Mesmo em menores…
Despite barely campaigning in many of key states until the days immediately following his blowout victory in South Carolina, former Vice President Joe Biden won 11 state primaries on Super Tuesday. Most notably, Biden won the delegate-rich Texas and North Carolina, the latter of which being a state…
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Maisie Wilen dress. Photo: Lula Hyers Outfitted in grungy fishnets, an array of glittery hair clips, and a black satin slip dress layered atop a long-sleeved T-shirt, the dream…
I live in Bloomsbury, a London neighborhood whose name is synonymous with a long-gone, still-romanticized period of post-Victorian literary and sexual experimentation. Today, its reputation is built primarily around its convenient spread of transit links, which loop out in every direction, funneling…
My 12-year-old son indulges in a lot of unpleasant behaviors. During Fortnite mania a couple years ago, for example, he said my wife and I were “fucking [him] in the ass” because we made him stop playing to go to his cello recital. He negotiates relentlessly, often pursuing the kind of flawed…
Life and Letters The Hunger Artist February 27, 2000 Sontag says of her fiction, “I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry.”Photograph By Richard Avedon Susan Sontag did two big things last year. She finished a novel, “In America,” which is being published by Farrar, Straus &…
Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Was there ever a time more suited to the whims of a male American teen than the early aughts? The video game Grand Theft Auto III had just shipped. LimeWire made Shaggy’s entire discography free and…
In 2016, Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman and interim CEO of Mozilla, sat down to update her manifesto. Well, technically, it's Mozilla's manifesto , but it's Baker's handiwork. Think of it as a sort of
There is a man in my mountain town who runs for office every chance he gets. Last year he ran for both the U.S. Senate and the state senate of Montana, eventually withdrawing from the first race and getting disqualified from the second. He ran for city council in 2017, during which contest he wrote…
Zoë Hu , January 7, 2020 Small Worlds The inward-looking lives of Little Women Sony Pictures Word Factory W o r d F a c t o r y What is Little Women? It’s a book by Louisa May Alcott. It is seven films, a BBC mini-series, and a Broadway musical. It’s a parable of feminist authorship. Who are the…
Louis Garrel as Professor Bhaer in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women Last week, my parents saw Little Women. My mother immediately phoned me. “I think Professor Bhaer is Jewish,” she said, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed excitement. I said I didn’t think the facts supported this theory. But…
Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Topeka School by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 282 pp., $27.00 What is a museum guard to do, I thought to myself; what, really, is a museum guard? On the one hand you are a member of a security…
Pivot To Image I had reached the point of diminishing returns. I wanted to quit Twitter, but my fingers were as if possessed, typing command+n, tw, return at any lull in the workday, letting autofill take care of the rest. Like an old woman who finds herself at a familiar bus stop in her nightgown,…
Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s third novel, a teenager named Adam Gordon creeps into what he thinks is his girlfriend’s house. He goes into the bathroom and notices the toiletries there aren’t hers. “Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house,” writes Lerner, “with his…
A Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly engineered with a gene drive that caused it to have red fluorescent eyes.Credit...Craig Cutler for The New York Times Feature A new genetic engineering technology could help eliminate malaria and stave off extinctions — if humanity decides to unleash it. A…
I first read Dostoyevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), on the recommendation of a young man. I was 18. He was two years older and more or less out of his mind. I recall the solemnity with which I told my mother I would love him forever. Two things stayed with me from that first…
In 2006, a team of Norwegian researchers set out to study how experienced psychotherapists help people to change. Led by Michael Rønnestad, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oslo, the team followed 50 therapist-patient pairs, tracking, in minute detail, what the therapists did…
One of the best things you can do for your health is to cut back on foods with added sugar. Our 7-Day Sugar Challenge will show you how. Credit...Reina Takahashi By Dec. 30, 2019 阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版 Here’s the last New Year’s health resolution you might ever need: resolve to stop eating added sugar.…
Courtesy: Chioma Ebinama I always assumed that I would spend the perimenopausal years of my life living alone in an unfurnished studio apartment, shouting incorrect Jeopardy! answers at my ancient television set and keeping company with none but a feral cat. I’m not a conventionally attractive…
Rachel Rabbit White (left). Photo: Brian Finke It’s her first-ever book party, and Rachel Rabbit White — the poet, writer, sex-work legend, activist, and ex–Times Square stripper — is all dolled up. I’ve never seen her otherwise, online or off. Tonight her brunette hair is blown out, curled, and…
Andrea Long Chu. (Photo by Maria Tomanova) S hort, sharp shock, like three bullets from Valerie Solanas’s gun, is the resounding effect of what the critic Andrea Long Chu writes. That’s how her high s
A Charmed Life Chris Kraus October 22, 2019 The best satire seems to spring from hatred and repugnance: Swift, Juvenal, Martial, Pope… Satire, I suspect, is usually written by powerless people. It is an act of revenge. – Mary McCarthy I’ve always loved Mary McCarthy. She fit the—very tiny, exacting,…
BY Audrey Wollen in Opinion | 09 SEP 19 While some have written that Norman Fucking Rockwell! is about the coming end of America, Del Rey knows that America is already over A BY Audrey Wollen in Opinion | 09 SEP 19 Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, 2019. Courtesy: Polydor/Interscope Where is…
Dark Side of the Ring Tuesdays at 10p Sex Before the Internet Tuesdays at 9p VICE In Your Inbox Sign Up Here Entertainment 25 Great Pop Culture Stories You Won't See Anywhere Else Who else would publi
Sophie Helf. Photo: Tavish Timothy Sophie Helf (@jil_slander) is a computer programmer and writer originally from the Bay Area who currently lives in New York. She is very good at getting lost in Brooklyn. This week, Sophie and I talked milkmaid blouses, Co-Star, and putting Glossier products up…
Brandy Jensen, The Outline’s Power editor, has made a lot of mistakes in her life. Has she learned from them and become a wiser person as a result? Hahaha oh gosh no. But it does leave her uniquely qualified to tell you what not to do — because she’s probably done it. Dear Fuck-Up, I’m 29 and a very…
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