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Verlyn Klinkenborg

Endless Summer

Brian Wilson’s songs still have the power to astonish on their own terms, from their own time.

October 6, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

Jed Perl

The Power of Ornament

An exhibition at the Drawing Center explores the astonishing variety that the ornamental impulse has inspired across centuries and continents but never grapples with the aesthetic questions it raises.

August 18, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue

Noah Isenberg

Clinging to Hollywood’s Underbelly

The B-movie director Hugo Fregonese—whose career led from Argentina to Hollywood and Europe—was preoccupied with the search for freedom in a violent world.

September 12, 2022

Jenny Uglow

Lear’s Lyrical Coasts

The seascapes that Edward Lear sketched on his travels around the Mediterranean are thresholds and boundaries that ask: To stay, or go?

September 8, 2022

Blair McClendon

A Brutal Place Playing at Paradise

The filmmaker James Benning invites us to look closely at American landscapes and peer into their history.

August 31, 2022

Joe Bucciero

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.”

August 25, 2022

Graphic Tales

A panel from Eleanor Davis's The Hard Tomorrow, 2019

Eleanor Davis, introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

November 2, 2019

Elke Schulze

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Saul Steinberg: New York Moonlight, 1974-1981

Chris Ware

Saul Steinberg’s Universe

Saul Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought.

May 26, 2017

Lucy Sante

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

November 17, 2016

The Latest

Janique Vigier

His Dreaminess Had Will

In the last three years of his life, the elusive New York artist Ray Johnson picked up what he called a “new career as a photographer.” His late pictures were a final message, prank, secret, or gift.

September 26, 2022

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

Hilton Als

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

September 23, 2022

Bench Ansfield

A Theater of State Panic

Beginning in 1967, the Army built fake towns to train police and military officers in counterinsurgency. Sierra Pettengill’s new documentary lays bare the fears and false promises behind them.

September 16, 2022

Martin Filler

Xanadu’s Architect

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

September 22, 2022 issue

Phoebe Chen

Perfect Recall

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film, a Scottish orchidologist moves through Colombia in pursuit of a lone, mysterious sound.

August 18, 2022

Rachel Eisendrath

I Killed a Man Back There

If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production?

August 10, 2022

Lucy Scholes

Made Alone and Imperatively

The British painter Maeve Gilmore found her muse in family and the home—but that refuge was not an idyll.

August 5, 2022

Sheila Liming

Old Story, New Money

The Gilded Age plunders Edith Wharton’s books for period-appropriate ideas but revels in all the surfaces Wharton sought to puncture.

August 3, 2022

Cintra Wilson

Downtown Confessional

John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations.

August 18, 2022 issue