World

The Player’s the Thing in “Grand Theft Hamlet”
In an 1818 lecture, on the subject of “Hamlet,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:Persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something...
What We See in Lauren Sanchez’s Cleavage
Remember a few years back when boobs were declared over? The data points supporting this claim were tenuous but nonetheless of some note. There was the Pornhub study from...
Liza Minnelli’s Desire to Touch
The avant-garde company Heartbeat Opera is engaging in another innovative game of source-text telephone, this time with a new iteration of “Salome.” The original draws from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous...
The Real-Life Drama of “Dying”
In observational documentaries, one important thing tends to be left unspoken: namely, why the films’ subjects let filmmakers embed in their lives. Without knowing what kind of visibility and...
The Long Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
Between 1848 and 1852, more than twenty thousand Chinese migrants made their way to San Francisco in search of gold. The vast majority were men—rural peasants from Guangdong Province,...
The Best Books We Read This Week
Our editors and critics review notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Source link
How the Academy Awards Have Adapted to Catastrophe
Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out...
Should You Question Everything?
Every few months, out of curiosity, I red-pill myself. Usually, I start with YouTube. The algorithm is extraordinarily responsive: give a couple of videos a thumbs-up, and your whole...
Donald Trump Plays Church
It’s usually gauche to take pictures in church. But at St. John’s, the Episcopal Church just across a sedate Lafayette Square from the White House, photography is inevitable at...
Till Lauer’s “Flames and Shadows”
For the cover of the January 27, 2025, issue, Till Lauer captured the tragic skyline in Los Angeles. The fires that have ravaged the city—burning through some forty thousand...
Washington’s Hostess with the Mostes’
Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the...