Friends
Story Stream
On the Literary Side of 'Friends' August 30, 2024
When you think of Friends, the perennial favorite of young people since 1994, an eternal bastion of comfort for innumerable viewers for thirty years now, living in perpetuity on network television and streaming, you think, probably, of sarcasm-laced ...
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin August 30, 2024
At the end of the 19th century, while Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and other Impressionist luminaries were lapping up the artistic pleasures of Paris, their colleague Paul Gauguin was elsewhere. To be precise, he was at home in the town of Punaʻauia in ...
30 Years of 'Friends' August 29, 2024
Oh. My. God. Could there be a better show? Thirty years on from the pilot, the sitcom about six friends in New York is still immensely popular, topping the list of most streamed shows on Netflix in the UK last year.The stars, Jennifer Aniston (Rachel...
The Keys to the Rooneyverse August 26, 2024
We’re a month from the novel after the most-reviewed novel of all time by the one secure Major Novelist of a generation. Sally Rooney’s fourth book comes out on the 24th of September. How might we structure our anticipation? The three previous novels...
The Trouble With Delmore August 26, 2024
Delmore Schwartz is a haunting reminder of the travails—or roller-coaster rides—of reputation. He burst onto the literary scene in 1938, some years before his peers, with the poems, verse play, and short story of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (193...
The Beginning and End of Postmodern America August 20, 2024
Do we live in normal times, times of bounded contestation and turmoil, of chaos and disarray that still operate within the paradigm of normal American politics? Or is that paradigm collapsing, from atrophy or from antipathy? For conservatives living ...
Why Is There No Travel Writing? August 19, 2024
I have this like ancient memory of being a teenager and finding nothing more interesting than travel writing — Paul Theroux, Ryszard Kapuściński, Robert Kaplan, people like that. I remember being very impressed when, in college, I discovered that a f...
Language and the Politics of the Swarm August 19, 2024
Last week, I learned the term “murmuration.” It refers to the simultaneous movement of a large group of birds, typically starlings, who fly and change direction together. I’m clearly no ornithologist, but I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon late...
The Wound and the Show August 16, 2024
Kat Tang’s debut, Five-Star Stranger, has a very bright and colorful dustjacket, but its less than effusive narrator, if not exactly unreliable, is not given to telling us what he’s feeling, and we sense that if we ever find out, somber tones will re...
Zoë Kravitz's (Shocking! Twisted! Brilliant!) Mind August 16, 2024
Zoë Kravitz just wanted to make her mother laugh. She needed to get her attention first, though. They were at home in Topanga, California, and her mom was surrounded by her closest friends. The group was tending to her in a way that Kravitz, just nin...
How I Learned to Love Mushrooms August 16, 2024
“The only way I can finish a writing assignment on time,” a screenwriter friend told me recently, “is if I steal some Adderall from my kid.”We were talking about the trouble we have getting things done, feeling inspired, being able to focus. I told h...
In Concert With the Transcendent August 15, 2024
Growing up, religion was more a matter of culture than faith for my family. My true spiritual formation was shaped by celebrity culture. My aunt dutifully took up my father’s request to be my godmother (despite rarely attending church), but her daugh...
The Surprising Truth About Loneliness in America August 15, 2024
Who are the loneliest people in America?American men were said to be in a “friendship recession,” with a survey finding the number of men without any close friends increased fivefold since 1990. Meanwhile, resurfaced comments from Republican vice pre...
What Happened to FOMO? August 09, 2024
When talking about the harms of social media today, one of the first problems people mention is FOMO—fear of missing out. Scroll through Instagram and see your friends having fun at a party you weren’t invited to. Check Snapchat to find everyone’s Bi...
In the Age of A.I., What Makes People Unique? August 07, 2024
Recently, I got a haircut, and my barber and I started talking about A.I. “It’s incredible,” he told me. “I just used it to write a poem for my girl’s birthday. I told it what to say, but I can’t rhyme that well, so it did all the writing. When she r...
Dreams of Creation August 07, 2024
Occupational hazards abound for Jay, the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Blue Ruin. We meet him in 2020, in the early days of Covid, as he delivers groceries in upstate New York. He has already contracted the virus and is suffering from its a...
What’s 2024’s “Song of the Summer”? August 01, 2024
A few weekends ago, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my friends’ parents to Chappell Roan.It started when I had a few bars of “Good Luck, Babe” stuck in my head and couldn’t stop humming it. The next thing I knew, we were all learning the “...
“Friends” as the Ideal Community May 28, 2024
In the very first episode of “Friends,” Rachel flees her wedding to find her high school friend. Monica invites Rachel to move into her spare bedroom and helps her get a job. Her brother Ross and their friends help her cut up her credit cards and lea...
Wars and Modern Memory May 27, 2024
A few weeks ago, my family found a pair of homemade football tickets in a box of my great-grandfather’s belongings, inviting the friends of Jim and Frances Ferguson to attend a watch party of the November 30, 1963, Army–Navy football game. I thought ...
The National D-Day Memorial May 27, 2024
Since the late nineteenth century, Americans at the end of May have honored and mourned all the men and women who have died while serving in the U.S. military. Although Memorial Day is often heralded as the start of summer (officially the last Monday...
Why Progressives Want to Forget George Floyd May 24, 2024
Leonard, the hero of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, cannot form new memories. This poses something of a problem when you’re trying to find the guy who killed your wife. Her brutal murder is the last thing Leonard remembers, and he has been hunting for ...
The Condemned May 23, 2024
The shadow of the mountain range crept over the flat, arid land like outstretched fingers on San Juan Diego’s outskirts. Once known for its teeming farming, only a few residents remained in the remote village near the Mexico border. With the work gon...
A French Reproach to Our Big, Baggy American Memoirs May 21, 2024
One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward a...
Inside Kevin Costner’s $38 Million 'Horizon' Gamble May 21, 2024
Sometimes Kevin Costner imagines that he’s watching himself in a film about Kevin Costner. He pictures himself in a theater; it’s dark and he’s gazing at himself in the same way we have over the years, rooting for him to succeed. In times of embattle...
Flannery O’Connor’s Salvific Intervention May 20, 2024
Few people in Flannery O’Connor’s life seem to enjoy her stories—at least according to Wildcat, the new biopic about the acclaimed Southern gothic writer. Her mother wonders why she can’t write “nice stories.” A family friend asks for “cute stories.”...
