The Political Scene
Sting of Myself
By Jane Mayer
As Dana Geraghty recalls it, March 16th was a “rather quiet Wednesday.” That afternoon, she was in her cubicle at the Open Society Foundations, on…
Reporting
The Sporting Scene
A Full Revolution
By Reeves Wiedeman
One night in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington, the nineteen-year-old American gymnast Simone Biles approached the balance beam. A competitor from…
A Reporter at Large
The Bank Robber
By Patrick Radden Keefe
A few days before Christmas in 2008, Hervé Falciani was in a meeting at his office, in Geneva, when a team of police officers arrived…
Letter from Oberlin
The Big Uneasy
By Nathan Heller
At Oberlin, it started in December, when the temperatures ran high, although the weeping willows and the yellow poplars that had flared in the fall…
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
Inventions of Mine That Have Been Misused for Evil Purposes
By Jack Handey
The remote-controlled “monster” jackhammer. The chloroform pillow. The mummy-reviver. The medicine cabinet that, when you open it, shoots a vitamin “bullet” into your mouth. The…
Fiction
Fiction
Fable
By Charles Yu
Once upon a time, there was a man whose therapist thought it would be a good idea for the man to work through some stuff…
The Critics
A Critic at Large
Beywatch
By Hilton Als
On the early May evening I saw Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter’s “Formation” tour, at Houston’s NRG Stadium, the dominant feature, onstage and off, was ass. It…
Books
The Metamorphosis
By Joshua Rothman
Thomas Thwaites first considered becoming an animal on a spring day in 2013. He was walking Noggin, his nieces’ Irish terrier, along the Thames when…
Books
Descendants
By Laura Miller
In Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, “Homegoing” (Knopf), a boy greeting the line of mourners at his grandfather’s funeral encounters a beautiful girl. “Respectfully, I will…
Books
Briefly Noted
The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota (Knopf). Sahota’s second novel, short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize, chronicles in immersive detail the lives…
On Television
Brief Encounters
By Emily Nussbaum
There’s a lot to be said for the six-episode cable drama. If it doesn’t work, no great loss—that’s only two nights wasted, not several years.…
The Talk of the Town
Comment
Opening Doors
By Jelani Cobb
The current circumstances in North Carolina—a tableau of states’-rights populism, an embattled minority seeking equality, a conflict over who is allowed to use public facilities,…
Be Prepared Dept.
Dirty Wars
By Nicholas Schmidle
Paul Burton, a retired British commando, was in Washington, D.C., recently to brief a group of journalists on how they might survive a week in…
Night of the Living Dead
Her Majesty
By Michael Schulman
Beware nineteen-eighties nostalgia. For every welcome return of Pee-wee Herman or “Ghostbusters,” there’s a revival of “Cats” or a Hulk Hogan sex tape lurking in…
Up Life’s Ladder
Part-Time Idol
By Andrew Marantz
Being Roy Kim is either remarkable or unremarkable, depending on the day, because Roy Kim is famous only in certain places. In South Korea, his…
Dept. of Hoopla
Had to Be There
By Rebecca Mead
Robert Wilson, the veteran experimental-theatre director, is celebrated for his attention to light—for spending hours making fractional adjustments to tone and color. Who better, then,…
Goings On About Town
Goings On About Town
This Week
Anna Magnani overflowed with vital energy in comedy and tragedy alike, as seen in Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective (through June 1). She gained…
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Big Names
By Russell Platt
In the program booklets of the New York Philharmonic, it is the house style to leave out a composer’s first name if the person is…
MOVIES
Blood Relatives
By Richard Brody
No great director has built a career with as overt and obsessive a relation to a cinematic forebear as Brian De Palma has in regard…
Tables for Two
Urbanspace Vanderbilt
By Shauna Lyon
It could be theorized that the proliferation of Roberta’s pizza is a benefit to society. This is actually happening, in part thanks to the London-based…
Bar Tab
Leaf Bar & Lounge
By Wei Tchou
“The vision, for me, is to make Flushing world-class,” Helen Lee, the co-owner of this Queens cocktail lounge, said on a recent Thursday night. The…
Poems
Cartoons
“He always gives me such a nice wave.”
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