It’s an odd feeling to give someone a spoiler alert for her own life story, but I didn’t want to ruin “Fosse/Verdon” for Ann Reinking. As of last week, the veteran dancer had not caught up with the FX miniseries, starring Sam Rockwell as the louche director-choreographer Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as the Broadway […]
The hit sitcom “Modern Family” is set to end next year. But fear not. There are any number of other modern families to observe, now that our long-running favorite is disbanding, including the following: A Guatemalan child is held at a border detention facility in Arizona; his parents are held at a border detention facility […]
Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the […]
In “Canvas” the narrator, a graduate student, is renting an apartment from an older woman, an artist named Agnes. The artist has arranged to use her studio there whenever she visits the city, yet while the two women sometimes share the same space, they barely know each other. What does that type of relationship—one of […]
In John Updike’s story “Gesturing,” first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. “The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,” Updike writes, “famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from […]
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to […]
Do: Explore a new warm-weather hobby, like kayaking, gardening, or hiking. Click Here: Don’t: Invest a lot of money in accessories for your hobby before trying it out. Thing That Will Inevitably End Up Happening: You purchase gardening shears, a single oar, and cute hiking boots, only to spend the bulk of your free time […]
The third season of Joe Swanberg’s Chicago-based series “Easy,” which dropped on Netflix two weeks ago, is anchored by an idea that’s as much a matter of aesthetic form as of dramatic substance. The nine episodes are centered on crucial conversations on which the very stuff of life—love and money, work and family, long-held dreams […]
The President of the United States is erratic, illiterate, and doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t know. The President has alienated former allies, befriended or courted murderous dictators, and has repeatedly brought the country to the brink of nuclear confrontation. The President lies constantly, knows that he is lying, and demands that Administration officials […]