The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

January 30, 2023

No Smoke, No Fire

Despite the gas lobby’s best efforts, Americans are waking up to the health impacts of gas stoves. There’s no going back.

February 1, 2023

Risk, Originality, Commitment

For Andrea Dworkin, literature and social change were always entwined. 

January 26, 2023

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

July 22, 2021 issue

The Bruegel of Bendel’s

The antic Jazz Age canvases of the painter, poet, and theatrical designer Florine Stettheimer can give the impression, at first glance, of a never-ending party.

May 16, 2017

Sargent & His People

An artist who was “at home everywhere, and belonged nowhere.”

October 8, 2015 issue

Irresistible El Greco

Throughout his career, in different materials, different styles, and different media, El Greco played two artistic traditions and two moods against each other: heavenly calm against earthly agitation as well as West against East.

June 19, 2014 issue

A Second Look at the Second Wave

“Feminism, to my mind, names the richest, most sustained body of thought we have about gender as both a constraining imposition and an uncontestably personal language.”

February 4, 2023

Highly Eccentric Characters

“Every biography is a work of artifice—it creates a narrative out of life, which is messy, unpredictable, contradictory, and mostly private.”

January 28, 2023

Beauty and Utility

“A well-executed building or inviting public space can bring people together in ways that strengthen our communal values and at the same time make us more aware of our individuality.”

January 21, 2023