Arts

Society & Culture

Blair McClendon

It’s Technicolor

Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso and Faulkner, whose name is shorthand for a whole field.

February 13, 2025 issue

Andrew Butterfield

A Half-Century of Artistic Genius

For two generations Sienese painters and sculptors engaged in a nonstop flurry of experimentation and innovation.

February 13, 2025 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general.

November 3, 2024

James Shapiro

Rebels Without a Cause

In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.

January 16, 2025 issue

Ian Tattersall

Look Who’s Talking

When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?

December 19, 2024 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Acts of Self-Erasure

A new exhibition of the conceptual artist Christine Kozlov shows how she worked by concealing her own tracks.

December 13, 2024

Martin Filler

The Architect Who Unified America

H. H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.

December 19, 2024 issue

On Old New York

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Jason Epstein

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

Lucy Sante

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

The Latest

Zoe Guttenplan

Spaghetti Underground

The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.

April 18, 2025

Jenny Uglow

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

April 24, 2025 issue

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

April 24, 2025 issue

Adam Shatz

‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’

The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.

March 27, 2025

Jean Dykstra

‘Routine, Ordinary Care’

The photographs in Carmen Winant’s latest book remind us how unsensational abortion access is, and how necessary.

March 8, 2025

Martin Filler

Build, Britannia!

As one of England’s foremost authorities on architecture, Gavin Stamp distinguished himself by focusing on how buildings are lived in, rather than how they look.

March 27, 2025 issue

Clare Bucknell

Studies for His Mind

Sir John Soane’s museum represents the rare survival of a collection that was more like an early modern cabinet of curiosities—flamboyant, overflowing, full of anomalies—than a nineteenth-century institution.

March 27, 2025 issue

Sally Rooney

Angles of Approach

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it.

March 27, 2025 issue