Style
Story Stream
How to Dress Like a Gentleman—And Why February 11, 2025
When I was 29 years old, I left the Marines and joined the CIA. It was a major transition—I moved from coastal North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and I went from being Captain Ackerman to Mr. Ackerman. But the most intimidating change was something ...
Please Don’t Ask Horsegirl to Rescue Indie Rock February 07, 2025
When she was in high school, which was not very long ago, Horsegirl’s Nora Cheng chose a Lou Reed quip as her yearbook quote: “One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”...
Right Young Things February 07, 2025
‘What made you open a restaurant?’ I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party. It’s home to figures from the intellectual right such as Cur...
The Dubious Return of the Brutalists February 04, 2025
On April 21, 1989, members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) invaded the headquarters of Burroughs Wellcome, the pharmaceutical behemoth behind AZT, the only approved treatment for HIV. Burroughs Wellcome billed patients $8,000 a year f...
The Vibe of Things Is the Heart of Things February 03, 2025
A vibe, Aristotle might say, is said in many ways; Becca Rothfeld, in her self-described “rant” against the term “vibeshift,” mentions a few. It can refer to a style or disposition, the way someone cuts through the air or the atmosphere of a street, ...
The End Of Merch May 29, 2024
Recently, I was reorganizing my dresser drawers when I discovered a thick layer of graphic T-shirts buried under my solid white standbys, undisturbed for many months. As I unfolded the creased garments, I found mementos I had bought as far back in 20...
Bill Walton’s Long, Strange Trip to Basketball Immortality May 29, 2024
Bill Walton was perhaps never so lucky as he was in his very first game of organized basketball, when he was but a fourth grader riding the bench on the sixth-grade squad at the Blessed Sacrament Parish School in San Diego, California. He sat for nea...
What Nellie Saw May 23, 2024
Remember the heady days of 2020? Progressives trained by the richest universities in the land suddenly had the chance to remake America in their image, the way they had always dreamed of doing. The result was so obvious and crushing a failure that on...
Why We Can’t Make Up Our Minds About Nuns May 21, 2024
From Chaucer’s supercilious Madame Eglantine in “The Canterbury Tales,” with her spoiled lap dogs and secular French airs, to Ryan Murphy’s ruthless Sister Jude in 2012’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a woman who wears a red negligee under her hab...
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...
‘Megalopolis’ Is a Big, Beautiful Mess May 21, 2024
“When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free,” says trailblazing and controversial urbanist Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) in Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis. As the title itself suggests, this film has the director reflecting ...
The Internet Infection May 17, 2024
The viscerally negative reaction (one Tweet got upwards of 1.3 million views) of The DiscourseTM to Honor Levy's My First Book, or rather, more importantly to Honor Levy's recent profile in The Cut, is enough to make the reviewer a partisan: a defend...
Honor Levy Says She’s “Grown Up and Full of Shame” May 15, 2024
Honor Levy, 26, is backlit on a Zoom screen by the midday California sun. A teddy bear is propped behind her. She’s wearing an oversized black T-shirt that, she shows me, reads “Undruggable Unshockable Unstoppable.” She no longer vapes, she says as s...
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...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 'Fallout' May 06, 2024
In terms of popular franchises that were ripe for adaptation, Fallout had to be one of the best candidates available. It’s an immensely popular video game series with a devoted fanbase, several bestselling games, and endless source material that a te...
'The Fall Guy' Wasn’t Always a Love Story May 06, 2024
You would not expect a big action flick called The Fall Guy to also be one of the more intimate and romantic movies of the year. Based on the cult 1980s Lee Majors TV show, David Leitch’s film follows a down-on-his-luck stuntman pulled into a missing...
Claire Messud’s Family Had Secrets May 01, 2024
Claire Messud isn’t entirely sure how long she has worked on her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, which will be released in mid-May. Over lunch in Manhattan earlier this month, she laid out a timeline with as many hops and skips as her en...
Don DeLillo’s Late Style April 22, 2024
An image. I am nineteen and finishing Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld on Alden Library’s main floor and can barely see the last paragraphs through tears. I had read most of the book that August between dishwashing shifts and in between Kool Blues...
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 ...
Art-Making in a Disenchanted Age April 19, 2024
Bitter Water Opera, the debut novel by Nicolette Polek published on Tuesday, asks exciting, original, and urgently relevant questions about the value and role of art. The book is a post-break-up story, whose depressed narrator first summons a whimsic...
The Poetics of Taylor Swift’s Style April 18, 2024
How should a poet dress? Since announcing her forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift—who’s been known to underline her albums’ themes and aesthetics with her own fashion choices—has shown us what, to her, a “tortured poet” loo...
What to Read Next If You've Got 'Shogun' Fever April 18, 2024
While you may have enjoyed the samurai stylings of Hulu’s Shogun—the plotting, the fighting, the politicking, the seppuku—would you believe it was actually based on a true story? Okay fine, the based-on-a-true-story of it all was probably clear all a...
New York’s Hottest Club Is a Literary Event April 17, 2024
When the writer and professor Amitava Kumar invited the book scout Erin Edmison to his reading at McNally Jackson Books’ Seaport location in February, Ms. Edmison penciled it into her calendar and “didn’t think twice about it,” she said, “because I a...
The Great American Speculator April 11, 2024
Emerson is a difficult subject for a biography; on one hand, a biographer must compete with his journals. And because some of Emerson's most famous and important essays were in the mode of biography–the strange and wonderful “Representative Men” seri...
Maybe You're Not Anxiously Attached April 11, 2024
Lately it feels as if everything depends on me figuring out my attachment style. If I want professional success I need to recognise my childhood patterns and reparent myself. If I want to maintain friendships I first have to heal my inner child. And ...
