Lorrie Moore

The Inspired Bricolage of Bruno Mars

The pop artist is sometimes disparaged as a charismatic impersonator of others’ music, but that misses his talent for truly inhabiting what he borrows and making something moving and new.

Millennials & ‘Normal People’

The series portrays states of mind much better than the novel does. Rooney is not likely to hear from viewers that “your book was better,” at least not very often or accurately, but she also may not care a whit.

The Queen of Rue

The coolly abstracted consciousness of Rachel Cusk’s stories

Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills

For a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.

The Case of O.J. Simpson

Ezra Edelman’s ESPN documentary ‘O.J.: Made in America’

A Very Singular Girl

The advice of Helen Gurley Brown

TV: The Shame of Wisconsin

‘Making a Murderer’ by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos

Sympathy for the Devil

The much limper second season of ‘True Detective’

Our Date with Miranda

The multitalented, uncategorizable Miranda July

Gazing at Love

Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’

Double Agents in Love

Is madness times two ever sexy? The problem with ‘Homeland’

Which Wisconsin?

Which Wisconsin?

Corruption seems to surround Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who faces Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in Tuesday’s recall election. Walker has a criminal defense fund already in place and rumors of indictments are in the air, regarding both his time as Milwaukee County Executive and his current use of state moneys. But many people in self-contradictory Wisconsin, the home of both the Progressive Party and of Joe McCarthy, may not care very deeply about the charges against Walker. There can be a begrudging provincial respect for someone in the national eye, as well as for the out-of-state billionaires who have helped fill Walker’s campaign coffers with $31 million—an unprecedented amount in Wisconsin political history.

Sassy Angel

The Roche-Wainwright-McGarrigle intertwinings comprise a musical family the sprawling brilliance of which has not been experienced perhaps since—well, we wonʼt say the Lizst-Wagners—but at least the Carter-Cashes. The extended family oeuvre, though varied, often has a conversational, smart-kids-at-summer-camp quality that is both folky and jokey. The Rochesʼ own wistful, clever songs are written with a sweet street spontaneity and prosody, and their clear, pure voices are like a barbershop trio of sassy angels. But most often they sound like plucky girls riding home on a school bus, making things up as they go along.

Werner Herzog on Death Row

Werner Herzog on Death Row

A documentary film is often part stunt, part lab experiment, and the way a documentary filmmaker pursues his or her story will always involve a bit of amateur sleuthing, as well as improv. That such scriptless adventures have attracted a great director like Werner Herzog is curious but not alarming. Good documentary films can be made cheaply and we seem to be living in an abundantly golden—or at least copper (penny-wise)—era of them. Herzogʼs latest film, Into the Abyss, much like his 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, uses the camera as a geiger counter to locate some of the more toxic elements of the American cultural psyche as seen through the questing mind of a pseudo-squeamish European: here the setting is small town Texas’s well-traveled road to death row.

Circus Elephants

Already in a condition of satire, the opening of the Tea Party-hosted GOP debate on Monday night in Tampa presented the eight Republican presidential candidates as good-looking characters—“The Diplomat” “The Newcomer” “The Firebrand”—who would have to battle one another off the electoral island.

Very Deep in America

On the NBC series ‘Friday Night Lights’

What If?

We love to read memoirs. Why shouldn’t we?

In the Life of ‘The Wire’