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Lady Gaga’s 'Mayhem' and the Art of Pop Nonconformity April 24, 2025
Five years after pandemic lockdowns disrupted the rollout of Chromatica, Lady Gaga has blessed our ears with her gigantic, return-to-form seventh studio album: Mayhem. The past years for the star have been action-packed with everything but giving us ...
The Truth About Love April 24, 2025
In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, seven varied speeches are made on the meaning of love at an all-male drinking party set in ancient Athens in 416 BCE. One of the participants is the philosopher Socrates, and when it comes to his turn to speak, he is ma...
Condition of America April 24, 2025
Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet i...
Plathanasius of Massachusetts April 23, 2025
Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. Th...
Director Ryan Coogler on 'Sinners' April 22, 2025
Ryan Coogler is the film darling of the moment right now, and for good reason. He’s got a good old-fashioned heater on his hands with Sinners, which pulled in over $60 million globally this weekend—and he's been having a lot of fun, charming movie fa...
The Pain of Passing April 22, 2025
Mayukh Sen’s scrupulous and moving biography, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, considers the Golden Age actress’ ambivalence toward her white and Sinhalese ancestry through a decolonial lens. In 1936, Merle Oberon, the...
Sawn-Off Bareness April 21, 2025
I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary....
How the WWE Stopped Being Great Again April 17, 2025
WWE has mastered a nifty magic trick. The company simultaneously announces record revenues while its flagship event, WrestleMania 41, struggles to sell tickets for the upcoming Easter weekend. This isn't merely growing pains from a corporate transiti...
How to Finally Divorce Your Toxic Sports Team April 16, 2025
About a year ago, while watching his team lose a must-win game, a fan of the Dallas Cowboys named CJ Boyd removed his replica jersey, balled it tight, and hurled it off the balcony of his apartment in DeSoto, Texas. While his partner looked on, filmi...
Climate Crisis as Divine Comedy April 16, 2025
As the writer Joy Williams strolls the beef barn at the county fair, she notes mournfully the lovely eyelashes of the future filets mignons. “There’s such a disconnect here,” she says. While charmed by the farm animals of southern Michigan, she knows...
Brian Tyree Henry Has Been Doing the Work April 15, 2025
Brian Tyree Henry is accustomed to portraying characters who are shouldering some massive burden. He broke out in Atlanta, in which he played Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, a drug-dealer-turned-rapper forced to reckon with the dangers of his old life and ...
Can A.I. Writing Be More Than a Gimmick? April 10, 2025
The new essay collection “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” by Vauhini Vara, opens with a transcript. “If I paste some writing here, can we talk about it?” Vara asks. Her interlocutor, the large language model ChatGPT, responds, “Of course!” Th...
The People Who Fall in Love With Chatbots April 09, 2025
During a particularly trying period of my pregnancy, I found myself relying on Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, for emotional support. Intrigued by this technology that was supposedly poised to put me, my husband, and everyone we knew out of a job, I ...
On Haley Mlotek’s 'No Fault' April 07, 2025
First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might upho...
One Hundred Years of Gatsby April 07, 2025
F.Scott Fitzgerald’s final royalty check was for $13.13, making him the recipient of a double dose of bad luck. By 1940, the novel he thought to be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was very nearly out of print, and the woman he regarded as the love...
Nu Metal Will Never Be Cool. That’s Why I Love It April 04, 2025
It doesn’t matter what I say to defend a band like Korn. I can—and often do—make the claim that they are the most influential rock group of the last 30 years, shaping an arc of experimentation with funk, jazz, rap, and hip-hop that pushed the genre i...
The Pop Culture Branding Explosion April 04, 2025
Tonight’s the night. To get ready, you pour yourself a glass of Johnnie Walker Squid Game whisky and comb your hair with your Beetlejuice-branded hairbrush. You spritz yourself liberally with your “Dobby™ Is A Free Elf” body spray and apply some Brid...
Missed 3s Are Taking Over the NBA April 03, 2025
In the summer of 1979, as he ended one of the most important meetings in basketball history, NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien quipped, “I think that I shall never see a thing more lovely than a three.” The NBA’s board of governors had just voted 15-7 t...
Bad Ghibli April 03, 2025
To slop or not to slop. It was one of those days on the internet. Last week, after the introduction of Open AI’s 4o model enabled advanced image generation in ChatGPT, users quickly discovered they could generate a picture of… well, almost anything t...
Why the Algorithm Loves Gen Z’s ‘It Couple’ April 03, 2025
It wouldn’t be hard to make the case that Olivia Dunne (you probably know her as Livvy) and Paul Skenes are the archetypal Gen Z power couple. She’s the gymnast-slash-influencer reshaping the way college athletes can profit off their own labor. He’s ...
To Gen Z, Emotions Are Kinky April 02, 2025
To Generation Z, there may be few things worse than traditional sexual mores. Gallup reported last year that “more than one in five Gen Z adults … identify as LGBTQ+.” While certain respondents identified specifically as lesbian or gay, many of those...
