World
The Frightening Familiarity of Late-Nineties Office Photos
In the winter of 1999, an odd little movie named “Office Space” gleefully demolished the conventional portrayal of white-collar work. The film, directed by Mike Judge, was set in...
What Can You Learn from Photographing Your Life?
As an obsessed amateur photographer, I spend too much time reading photography forums on the Internet. Not long ago, I came across a particularly plaintive discussion. “Let’s say, hypothetically,...
Sovereignty for Sale
In the past few years, a secretive consortium of technologists and investors has spent almost a billion dollars to purchase about ninety square miles of farmland on the eastern...
The Decline of the Working Musician
Before the gig economy consumed a third of the workforce, it was mostly musicians who worried about gigs. There are debates about the origins of the word—some believe it...
“Disclaimer” Is a Baffling Misfire from a Great Auteur
At the climax of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film “Roma,” a woman named Cleo walks into the sea until the waves reach her neck. Cleo doesn’t know how to swim,...
Girl, What Waist?
Remember the Trompe l’Oeil Sweatpants from Balenciaga? The nearly twelve-hundred-dollar heather-gray drawstring pants that seemed ordinary, innocent of fashion, until the shopper, scanning upward, caught the plaid trick happening...
The Women’s Midlife-Crisis Novel Enters the Season of the Witch
What does a woman in midlife want? The opening scene of Susan Minot’s new novel, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” hazards an answer. Ivy—a writer, early fifties, divorced, devoted mother...
Elisheva Biernoff’s Family of Man
Ever since the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced, in the mid-eighteen-twenties, what is now the world’s oldest surviving photograph—a lonely, ghostly image of a rooftop taken from a...
The Artistic Revolution of Portuguese Cinema
“The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” a month-long series now getting under way at MOMA, does more than just present extraordinary (and extraordinarily rare) movies that happen to share...
Adam Driver and Jim Parsons Star in Two Versions of Americana
Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling,” a discursive, queasily romantic comedy about the emptiness of American celebrity, is back for another stint Off Broadway. At the Lucille Lortel,...
