Books & Culture

In the age of MAGA, the show’s small-town values are both a relief and slightly outdated. In the end, will we and the animated characters all live like city people?

Brìghde Chaimbeul frees her instrument from the confines of kitsch.

A not-so-fine mess.

We celebrate the period as a golden age of cultural rebirth. But two new books argue that the Renaissance, as we imagine it, is little more than myth.

Right thinks we are a good person. Left does not.

The podcast host recommends three recent favorites—about the gentrification of punk, what makes a great actor, and the corrosive influence of social-media platforms.

Our editors and critics review notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

“Moderation,” “Via Ápia,” “Misbehaving at the Crossroads,” and “The Key to Everything.”

Jean Renoir’s tragic farce, from 1939, scathingly denounced French society’s frivolity amid threats of war and fascism.

Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future.

Shawn Levy’s biography of Clint Eastwood explores revelatory connections between the filmmaker’s methods and his deep-rooted world view.

Ari Aster’s neo-noir Western involves a gun-toting sheriff, COVID, the George Floyd protests, and a mysterious A.I. data center. The writer-director talks with Adam Howard.

A masa-based version at Hellbender, a riff on soufflé at Pitt’s, and a modern-classic stack at S&P Lunch.

The city is defined by street carts and family-run restaurants. ICE’s vicious campaign has prompted many venders and patrons to stay home.

At Le Chêne, in the West Village, a “Top Chef France” alumna cooks up chilly Gallic chicness.

The new restaurant, near Union Square, offers hard-to-find regional dishes. But you’ll have to wait in line.

CBS and its parent company, Paramount, have set an end date for one of the last public pipelines to some version of the truth.

If human workers don’t have to read, write, or even think, it’s unclear what’s left for them to do.

The HBO series is peppered with references to real-life personages and historical events—but it lacks the anything-goes energy of the era in which it’s set.

The television series gives period-drama treatment to one of the most scandalous families of twentieth-century Europe.

Jeremy O. Harris, at his first Williamstown Theatre Festival as creative director, turns up the heat under rare works by the great Southern playwright.

After years of progress in diversity, many companies’ upcoming slates feature mostly, and in some cases entirely, male-writer lineups. The backslide has prompted an outcry.

Jordan Tannahill’s explicit new play fetishizes the British Royal Family but has more than sex on its mind.

The author discusses his story “Happy Days.”

The artist, on tour this summer, makes songs underpinned by feelings of dread and longing.

The artist’s album “New Threats from the Soul” is suffused with listlessness and yearning, dark jokes, and wordy disquisitions on desire.

The musician and “Portlandia” co-creator dissects an iconic rock-and-roll image: a 2003 photograph of Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, for a New Yorker profile.

Pygmalion’s visceral rendition of the B-Minor Mass.