Challengers
Story Stream
Tennis Explains Everything May 23, 2024
Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players m...
Miranda July on a Mid-Life Reawakening May 13, 2024
The writer, artist and filmmaker Miranda July is known for pushing boundaries. Her fiction provokes, not just with unconventional couplings and offbeat sexual acts, but by charting previously unmapped terrain. In All Fours, her first book in almost a...
Breaking with the Poetry World’s Orthodoxy May 10, 2024
On January 10, 1963, one month before she took her life, Sylvia Plath recorded her last session with the BBC in London amid snowy, frigid weather that brought the city to a standstill. She reviewed Contemporary American Poetry, an anthology edited by...
The Impossible Is Indeed Possible May 10, 2024
Author Junot Diaz remembers a family member of his in the Dominican Republic who was believed to be a medium that would “become possessed” whenever she heard “certain kinds of music or certain kinds of drums.” In contrast to the rationalism that came...
'Dune: Part Two' Elevates the Original May 08, 2024
I was too young to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it hit theaters a little over two decades ago. When I heard that one of Hollywood’s finest working directors, Denis Villeneuve, would shortly be adapting Dune to the big screen, I was determin...
An interview with Max Daniel Lawton May 08, 2024
Max Daniel Lawton is a Los Angeles-based writer and translator who has distinguished himself by the breadth and variety of his English translations. I sat down with him to discuss the recent publication of his translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue L...
'Challengers' Empty Love Triangle May 08, 2024
All movies with complicated time schemes have the same problem to overcome: the movie’s dramatic sequences, like tiles in a mosaic, must be trimmed to fit into a rigid pattern. Certain information must be highlighted in order to emphasize dramatic co...
Our Dystopian Future Is Inside Your Gambling App May 07, 2024
Earlier this month, basketball player Jontay Porter, former Toronto Raptors benchwarmer, saw his short and unimpressive NBA career come to an abrupt end. This severe penalty stems from his involvement in a gambling scheme that exploited his access to...
“Challengers” Is Essentially a Well-Shot Commercial May 03, 2024
“I don’t watch tennis matches,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” a movie about tennis players, recently said in an interview with Little White Lies, a film magazine. “It’s quite boring to me.” The problem, he explained, has to do with ...
The Only Relationship That Matters in 'Challengers' May 02, 2024
Tennis isn’t just a game—it’s a relationship, a thing that you share, something that happens between people. It’s a rare thing, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) tells two boys she’s just met: In a match, you may see real tennis for only 15 seconds. It’s hard t...
Does ‘Challengers’ Serve an Ace or a Fault? April 30, 2024
When Challengers hit theaters on Friday, a bizarre prophecy was fulfilled: the female lead of a Spider-Man movie went on to pick up a tennis racket. This trend (divine calling?) started with the original Mary Jane, Kirsten Dunst, who followed up Spid...
Challengers Is a Brutal Game of Desire April 29, 2024
In Luca Guadagnino’s 2022 film, Bones and All, Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothee Chalamet) were cannibals in love. “I don’t wanna hurt anybody,” Maren tells Travis weakly, to which he drawls in reply: “Famous last words.” This exchange serves ...
The Death of Gutenberg April 29, 2024
For a brief period after the near-simultaneous birth of the smartphone and social media, euphoria prevailed. Instant web-enabled communications networks, it was widely believed, were delivering into the hands of the masses the means to fulfill the br...
How Sci-Fi Inspired Conspiracy Theory April 29, 2024
In 1950, a U.S. Army psyops officer named Paul Linebarger used a pseudonym to publish a science-fiction story titled “Scanners Live in Vain” in a pulp magazine. It was about a man named Martel who works for the “deep state” in the far future as a mys...
All’s Fair in Love and Tennis April 26, 2024
Subtlety is not one of Luca Guadagnino’s virtues. The 52-year-old Italian director thrives on excess, on sequences that feel like they could suddenly spin out of control. When Ralph Fiennes’s platinum-plated record producer vamps impulsively to the R...
Love Means Everything in 'Challengers' April 25, 2024
A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay. In his shimmering melodrama “I Am Love” (2009), whose beauties range from the churches of Sanremo to the alabaster countenance o...
'Challengers' Will Make You Sweat April 25, 2024
The tennis match that begins, ends, and provides the central narrative framework for Challengers, the vibrant new film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Suspiria) at first strikes the viewer as implausibly high-stake...
The Best Buyer for TikTok April 25, 2024
TikTok could be “harming vulnerable Americans” or exposing our democracy to “covert foreign influence.” So say supporters of the bill President Biden signed yesterday, which requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media ...
Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation April 23, 2024
Everyone needs to eat somewhere, and in New York City that place is often a restaurant. New York is a city of long hours, tiny kitchens, cramped apartments—and dining out, a lot. There is, improbably, always an occasion: date night, working late, fri...
The Mental is Political April 19, 2024
Political satires, like politicians themselves, often have a hard time striking a balance. Tilt too much in one direction and you alienate your base, tilt too much in the other direction and you end up preaching to the choir. Many authors lose their ...
Is Tom Ripley Gay? April 18, 2024
Is Tom Ripley gay? For nearly 70 years, the answer has bedeviled readers of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of a diffident but ambitious young man who slides into and then brutally ends the life of a wealthy Amer...
NPR’s New CEO Hates Tech, Too April 18, 2024
This week, on the heels of a whistleblower piece published at the Free Press, Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, is under fire. Journalists and activists like Christopher Rufo have resurfaced her long history of making public, inflammatory stateme...
Vinson Cunningham’s Novel of the Obama Campaign April 15, 2024
THE NOSTALGIA AMONG LIBERALS for the Obama presidency has lately crested such that it’s a surprise that proposals to overturn the 22nd Amendment haven’t gained traction, even in the fantasy realm of non-feasibility where a lot of American political t...
The Secret Shame of Smoking Moms April 08, 2024
I wish I could say that I ever tried to hide my smoking from my children, but the reality is that I couldn’t, because I was around them all the time and I also smoked all the time. When I switched to vaping after about a year into my midlife relapse ...
Has Beyoncé Killed Jolene? April 05, 2024
Not long ago, a post crossed my timeline featuring a black-and-white, heart-stoppingly gorgeous photo of Dolly Parton in the Sixties. The caption read, simply: “What the hell did Jolene look like?” One can only wonder.As a musical artefact, “Jolene” ...
