World
Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home
Three years ago, Emma Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, got word of a micro-budget horror movie called “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” The film, which became...
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Pawns in the Park”
People tend to move with speed and purpose around New York City, so its public spaces are not often associated with sitting and thinking for hours on end. Yet,...
Notes on a Last-Minute Safari, by David Sedaris
It was a good year for Christmas parties. At one, I met a number of authors I had always admired. This can be tricky, but they were all lovely....
Richard Linklater Unmasks Glen Powell in “Hit Man”
The director dissects a pivotal scene in his noir-inspired screwball comedy, which is loosely based on the real-life story of a fake hit man who helped detectives bust people...
What COVID Did to Fiction
In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would sometimes comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”...
When the C.I.A. Messes Up
Saddam Hussein was known for many qualities, but subtlety was not among them. An oft-repeated anecdote relates that, during a cabinet meeting, he floated the idea of stepping down...
Should We Kill Some Wild Creatures to Protect Others?
The northern spotted owl is about a foot and a half high, with very dark eyes, a greenish beak, and a rim of feathers, called a facial disk, that...
Charli XCX Toys with Stardom on “BRAT”
Halfway through Charli XCX’s new album, “BRAT,” the British pop star delivers a lyric that is “pop” in neither form nor content. She is rapping, more or less, her...
Annie Baker Shifts Her Focus to the Big Screen
A mother sits in the front seat of a car, her tanned and freckled face glowing; her daughter, owlish and opaque behind her glasses, stares at her mother’s cheek,...
A Pitch-Perfect Ode to Korean “Drivers’ Restaurants”
This level of meticulous world-building is nothing new in restaurantland. Diners are used to being transported, via the meticulous construction of space and vibe, to the faraway, the unfamiliar,...
