Celebrity
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The Shallowness of Celebrity Politics November 26, 2024
The plot of Fritz Lang’s enigmatic 1927 silent film Metropolis revolves around a group of powerful elites determined to maintain their hold over the masses. To do so, they set out to invent artificial crises with the intention to set the everyday fol...
Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists November 26, 2024
Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: Shakespearean profundity, Dickensian squalor, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Rabelaisian—satirical, excessive, corpulent—joins these ranks. The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, ...
An Unscientific American November 22, 2024
The day after the 2024 election, journalist Paul D. Thacker posted on his X account a series of expletive-filled posts from Laura Helmuth’s Bluesky account, in which she apologised “to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” upb...
The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal November 20, 2024
These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-fiv...
What Are We? November 19, 2024
Over the past several months, I haven’t been able to escape Chappell Roan. The 26-year-old singer shot to fame this spring after finding viral success with infectious synth-pop songs celebrating unbridled sexual freedom. The most popular tracks of he...
How Media Is Failing Young Men November 18, 2024
Are young men … OK? That’s a question that seems to be on many a mind these days as conversations about gender, sexuality, and what it means to be a “man” reach a fever pitch in the media and beyond. A large part of that discourse revolves around an ...
The Paradoxes of Frank Auerbach November 14, 2024
“Only the true looks new, otherwise it looks like a picture”, believed Frank Auerbach, the celebrated German-British artist who died at his home on 11 November at the age of 93. Nothing could be more painterly than his work; his pigments stand proud ...
Only in The New Yorker November 13, 2024
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story...
Why Do Democrats Covet Taylor Swift’s Support? September 10, 2024
One of the most important figures in this year’s US presidential election isn’t a politician, political operator or political commentator. It’s the pop star Taylor Swift.Her endorsement has been a long time coming, and is apparently so valuable that ...
The Female Hit Man September 09, 2024
One of my guilty pleasures is to watch action movies about hitmen, and in particular hitmen who are female (hitwoman? hitperson?). The guilty part comes from the fact that I am a firm believer in the need for a strong rule of law, and it is impossibl...
Push the Button September 09, 2024
Over Labor Day weekend, Twin Falls, Idaho, held a 50th anniversary celebration of the September day in 1974 when Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket. Twin Falls is a city of about 50,000 people in southern Idah...
Celebrating the Centennial of the Most Underappreciated American of Our Time September 06, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) September 7th marks the one-hundredth birthday of one of the most extraordinary and inspiring...
How Motherhood Was Weaponised September 03, 2024
By the summer of 1978, not one but two conception stories had made UK headlines that year. The bigger story was that of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”, who was conceived via in vitro fertilisation after her parents, Lesley and John,...
Garth Greenwell’s Grand Romance September 02, 2024
On a muggy July afternoon in Iowa City, I went grocery shopping with the writer Garth Greenwell. We hit up the town’s 1971-founded co-op armed with a short list from his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz. I was going over for dinner the next day, and ingr...
30 Years On, Oasis Is Definitely Worth Celebrating September 02, 2024
It’s been a big week for Oasis fans. On Tuesday, the group that once reasonably, if immodestly, billed itself as the greatest rock band in the world announced that it would be reuniting for a series of shows in 2025, more than 15 years after its last...
Slouching Towards Celebrity September 02, 2024
Griffin Dunne’s memoir bobbed around the bestseller list after it was published in June, and though it’s since slipped off, my guess is the book will prove to have staying power....
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...
Culture Froze in the Biden Era. Is It Finally Heating Up? August 15, 2024
Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the ...
The Peculiar Joy of Watching Tom Cruise Jump From the Sky August 13, 2024
The most entertaining part of what we will call the Tom Cruise Movement of the Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony wasn’t so much the stunts. The live jump into the Stade de France was unremarkable for an event that had performers dropping from great hei...
America Deserves a Star Spangled Banger August 13, 2024
Over the last three weeks at the Paris Olympics, “The Star Spangled Banner” was played 40 times, once for every gold we’ve won. Our athletes have scored more medals than any other country, but when it comes to the music that celebrates those champion...
Bonfire of the Humanities August 12, 2024
“I really think that you should read Caledonian Road,” a colleague advised me, soon after the publication of Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel. “The main character is actually a member of this department.” It sounded more like a warning than...
Robbie Robertson’s Family Feud August 12, 2024
On a rainy Nov. 15, 2023, a small group of music and film luminaries gathered at the Village Recorder, the famed studio housed in an old Masonic temple in West L.A. where everything from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk to Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle was recorded.Am...
The Lost Arts August 09, 2024
There were both too many metal guitarists for a stately ceremony on the Seine, and yet, too few. When the broadcast cut to a wide shot of the Conciergerie, it revealed nothing, nothing—a vast expanse of beige wall with a few ant-like figures crawling...
The Godmother of the French New Wave August 09, 2024
It took years for Agnès Varda, the so-called godmother of the French New Wave, to command respect in the male-dominated world of directing. Yet by the time Varda died, in 2019, at age 90, she had risen to sainthood and was internationally celebrated ...
Celebrity Fine Artist Nick Cave August 06, 2024
When I turned 18, I already knew I wanted tattoos. Back then, in 2006, it was still rare to have them, and felt like an easy way to subvert the dry, stiff, Cape Cod conservatism that I was brought up in. I somewhat regret getting so many of them now,...
