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What The New Yorker Was Watching in 1925
Film criticism at The New Yorker started with a bang: the first movie reviewed in the first issue, dated February 21, 1925, was the German director F. W. Murnau’s...

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had...

How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were...

Cindy Sherman’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley
For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8,...

New York City, Taco Town
Santo Taco, one of the newest of the newcomers, opened this spring, in a sliver-slim SoHo space that previously housed La Esquina’s taqueria, whose primary function was as a...

The High Femme Dystopia of Star Amerasu
If the recent embrace of seemingly—and only seemingly—autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in “The Matrix” awaits us. During the 1999 film’s...

The Vibrant, Disappearing World of India’s Photo Studios
The Jagdish Photo Studio in Manori appeared to Ketaki Sheth as a kind of apparition. A photographer from Mumbai, Sheth owns a home in the coastal village, about a...

My Mother, New Orleans
My father, who was born in New Orleans and who died there just last year, used to always say, “Funny that they call this the Big Easy.”In August of...