Miranda July’s Uncomfortable Comedies, and a Toast to Roger Angell
Miranda July’s third feature film is “Kajillionaire,” a heist movie centered on a dysfunctional family, and her first with a Hollywood star like Evan Rachel Wood. Like most of her work, it can be clas...
22 Sep 202030min
An Election in Peril
This Presidential race is a battle for the soul and the future of the country—on this much, both parties agree—and yet the pitfalls in the election process itself are vast. David Remnick runs through ...
18 Sep 202019min
The Composer Richard Wagner and the Birth of the Movies
The German composer Richard Wagner had an enormous influence not only on modern music but on artists of all stripes, and on political culture as well. His use of folkloric material to create modern ep...
15 Sep 202016min
What to Do with a Confederate Monument?
Across the South and well beyond, cities and states have been removing their Confederate monuments, recognizing their power as symbols of America’s foundational racism. In the town of Easton, Maryland...
11 Sep 202033min
N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft, and Jill Lepore on the End of a Pandemic
N. K. Jemisin has faced down a racist backlash to her success in the science-fiction community. But white supremacy in the genre is nothing new, she tells Raffi Khatchadourian. Her recent novel “The C...
8 Sep 202027min
Bette Midler and the Screenwriter Paul Rudnick on “Coastal Elites”
This segment contains adult language. In the new film “Coastal Elites,” Bette Midler plays a New Yorker of a certain type: a retired teacher who lives on the Upper West Side, reads the New York Times ...
4 Sep 202022min
Rick Perlstein on Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump
“Reaganland” is the new volume in Rick Perlstein’s long chronicle of the American conservative movement; the four books, which he began publishing in 2001, run some 3,000 pages in total. While the aut...
28 Aug 202020min
Everyone Knew Who Shot Ahmaud Arbery. Why Did the Killers Walk Free?
It has been six months since Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, was shot by three white men while he was out for a Sunday jog near his childhood home. The video of the killing, taken by one of the men ...
25 Aug 202027min
