Snapshot Hari Nef is joining the cast of “Transparent.”Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Some women really know how to make an entrance. Consider Hari Nef, who had been in The New York Times offices for about 10 minutes before the Twitterverse issued an alert: “it’s been rumored that…

Near midnight on Monday Gay Talese was tucked into a corner booth in the downstairs bar at the 21 Club, sipping a Bombay martini with a twist, with a specimen from his much-admired hat collection sitting politely beside him. It was nearly two hours after guests including Frank Stella, Michael…

Earlier this fall, Antonio Banderas, a.k.a. Zorro, began taking classes in menswear design at Central Saint Martins, the renowned London fashion school. In an interview with the school’s student-run Web site and magazine, Banderas explained that he wanted to start his own menswear line; his…

Its achievements are undeniable. Having hosted what some historians call the greatest creation of wealth in human history,1 the San Francisco Bay Area had the fastest growth rate in the United States in 2012,2 the highest per-capita gross domestic product,3 one of the highest average IQs,4 and has…

My sister and I recently toured the retirement community where my mother has announced she’ll be moving. I have been in some bleak clinical facilities for the elderly where not one person was compos mentis and I had to politely suppress the urge to flee, but this was nothing like that. It was a very…

Illustration by María Inés Gul. Regret, in my head, sounds like Joanna Newsom’s voice: I have often turned to her music in endings, in trying to remember beginnings, to parse everything in between, to know what I could have done differently, what I ought to have said. Divers, her first album in five…

Powys begins with the tenet that “culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn” and sets out to examine what, exactly, is left over — which is often too surprising and subtle, too aglow with inarticulable radiances, to fit into our intellectual…

Interview with “New York Magazine” Associate Editor Joe Coscarelli Joe Coscarelli is 23-years-old and is an Associate Editor at New York Magazine. Yes, he is killing it. He previously worked at The Village Voice (and even had a cover story) and has contributed to a large variety of publications. His…

"I'll never be your dream girl," sings Claire Boucher on "Butterfly", the final song on Art Angels, her most audacious album to date. Perhaps she's just being coy, because for many she is exactly that. In the age of the female pop auteur, Boucher's work as Grimes is a glorious addition to the canon,…

Boucher is a veteran of Montreal’s underground scene (her first release was 2010’s murky-pretty lo-fi tape Gedi Primes, named after a planet in Dune), but she’s just as much a child of the internet — which is to say a resident of everywhere. Grimes’s music has become such perennial think-piece…

Page-Turner November 3, 2015 After the image of a Brooklyn student named Vidal captured widespread attention on the Humans of New York blog, he and the photographer, Brandon Stanton, were invited to the White House.PHOTOGRAPH BY BRANDON STANTON. COURTESY ST. MARTIN’S PRESS The most famous photograph…

Un quincho fue reconvertido en escenario en la Casa Karaku • JUAN CARLOS MEZA / FOTOCICLO

Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held. As a result, soccer players communicated by email about their respective plans. “Hey, that talk looks pretty great,” a white student wrote to a…

The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at them, is to be openly critical — this is actually nonsense. Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount…

Ryan Murphy has a weakness for women having breakdowns. The TV show creator and director lives for the broken lady: the delusional, tempestuous middle-aged woman who’s lost all self-control, like the totalitarian cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Glee, or the actual witches of American Horror…

Last Saturday night at London’s Royal Academy, I watched two men attempt to play the internet like an instrument. More specifically, it was a performance called Network Ensemble, which involved taking collated network data and bringing it to life in sound. Even more specifically, it involved a lot…

In April, I settled an argument with myself. After years of assuming that a small and compact phone was what I wanted, I realized that the iPhone 6 Plus was the pocket computer for me. The size, harder one-handed operations, software slowdowns caused by memory constraints and resolution downsampling…

Cultural Comment October 28, 2015 Is “Sorry” an acceptable cap to Bieber’s year of penitence? By all accounts, this has been an eventful month for template-skewing music videos. Adele planted herself in a clearing and theatrically clapped a flip phone shut (“Hello”). Drake pulled on a turtleneck and…

André Foeken 14 min read· May 31, 2015 -- Those who are no longer purely driven by financial gain are now creating the building blocks for an entire economy in which money no longer has value. As we proceed towards this post scarcity economy, the next generation of companies is actively trying to…

When I look back at my Instagram, here’s what I don’t see: That most of the time I felt ugly, even as I was taking selfies; that I didn’t really feel like the friends I took those fun photos with were always there for me; that school was sort of hell sometimes. But what I posted never felt fake,…

Drake in his latest video “Hotline Bling.” In the beginning, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” was a pure child of the Internet. Released in July on his label’s SoundCloud page following a premiere on Apple Music’s OVO Sound Radio, it felt like a casual throwaway, a breezy compatriot to “Charged Up,” his…

Photos: See Jaden Smith Wear Fall’s Trippiest Clothes Jaden Smith has a game he likes to play whenever he's in public, or whenever he's stating something that will eventually become public—such as right now—and the game goes like this. It starts with him saying something Jaden-like. For example: “Me…

Coffee played an integral role in the early-2000s mother-daughter psychodrama Gilmore Girls , and Luke Danes, the town’s dinerman, was its primary purveyor. Much was made throughout the series about h

This image was removed due to legal reasons. Isabel Allende needs no introduction, but we will introduce her anyway. Allende is a Chilean author whose debut novel was the magical realist sensation La

Gilmore Girls is one of the great triumphs of modern TV—a sharp, endlessly rewatchable dramedy that holds up better than most new television, with a Netflix fanbase as wide as its original audience on the (now-defunct) WB network. It also had one of the worst goodbyes in TV history, airing a…

TV shows are rarely underrated anymore. The days of a pretty good show having one season and getting canceled (“Freaks and Geeks” being a prime example) are, for the most part, over. Now there are fan blogs and “f yeah” Tumblrs that allow fan bases to be very vocal and create a buzz that sometimes…

A Critic at Large Out of Bethlehem August 17, 2015 Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in April, 1967, reporting the story that became “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” “That piece is a blank for me,” she said later.Photograph by Ted Streshinsky / Corbis In the late spring of 1967, Joan Didion,…

The evolutionary value of ‘artistic‘ skills when predators are few The magnificent riflebird ( Ptiloris magnificus ) has evolved in a habitat largely free of predators and other existential threats. T

The Greats Credit...Portrait by Craig McDean. Styled by Mel Ottenberg I DRESSED VERY CAREFULLY for her, the way I would for a good friend, thinking hard about what she likes. What I think she likes. I ordered Uber Black — the highest level of Uber I’ve ridden. The driver said it would be about an…

Frank Ocean / frankocean.tumblr.com I was in bed with a stranger when I first saw a tweet about Frank Ocean’s now infamous 2012 Tumblr post—the one in which the singer revealed that his debut album, Channel Orange, was, in part, about a boy. It was the middle of the night, and I turned over to check…

For most writers, cool is a word that rarely tops the list of personality descriptors. Neurotic and introverted are generally in heavier rotation. For women writers, you can add solipsistic and confessional. Maybe that’s part of the reason Joan Didion, who’s been called all those things but for whom…

In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white. We will use the pr

by Joe Berkowitz and Hallie Bateman Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of…

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily…

Cultural Comment September 30, 2015 Max Martin, pictured at the 2015 Grammy Awards, has written nearly two dozen No. 1 songs, for performers including Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL TRAN / FILMMAGIC VIA GETTY Among the stranger aspects of recent pop music history…

BENJAMIN FERNANDEZ B: Sobre la decadente educación paraguaya. http://t.co/FTUOvMhJm8

They begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally, than before

I’ve written and rewritten this blog in my head several times over the past few months. As many of you know, I have been recovering from anorexia since April. I was at an Ivy League school, a D-1 athlete and should have been living my dream. Nobody expected me to end up in the hospital with an…