120 articles
Showing 81–100 of 120 articles
Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a 1,344-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who reshaped New York City through highways, bridges, and parks while destroying neighbourhoods and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents — is riveting precisely because its subject is detestable.
2024-10-28
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, follows a young German engineer who visits a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for three weeks and stays for seven years.
2024-10-24
The dinner table is the most underestimated piece of furniture in domestic architecture.
2024-10-23
Makaya McCraven, a drummer and producer based in Chicago, has developed a creative method that would have been technologically impossible a generation ago: he records live improvisations, then deconstructs and reassembles them in the studio, layering beats, samples, and effects to create compositions that are simultaneously acoustic jazz and electronic music.
2024-10-19
Blaise Pascal observed in the seventeenth century that all of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
2024-10-13
The United Nations Security Council chamber in New York, designed by Arnstein Arneberg in 1952, seats delegates in a horseshoe arrangement facing each other across an open floor.
2024-10-13
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, published as twelve issues in 1986-87 and collected as a single volume, deconstructed the superhero genre with a narrative complexity that literary fiction rarely achieves.
2024-10-06
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film Mirror unfolds at a pace that contemporary audiences, trained by algorithmic content, may initially find unbearable.
2024-09-26
Terrence Malick's films are not difficult because they are obscure — they are difficult because they operate on principles that mainstream cinema has trained audiences to resist.
2024-09-25
Opera's intimidation factor is inversely proportional to actual experience.
2024-09-23
Jamel Shabazz began photographing the young people of Brooklyn and Harlem in the early 1980s, capturing the emergence of hip-hop culture with a warmth and intimacy that distinguished his work from the voyeuristic poverty tourism that characterised most media coverage of Black urban life.
2024-09-22
Nevermind by Nirvana did not merely define the 1990s — it detonated the decade's arrival.
2024-09-15
The most reliably interesting people at any gathering share a common trait: they read widely.
2024-09-12
The solitary museum visit is one of the most enriching and underappreciated activities available to a modern man.
2024-09-07
Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, typed in a three-week burst on a single continuous scroll of paper, chronicles the cross-country journeys of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty during the late 1940s.
2024-09-01
Tom Ford's 2009 directorial debut, adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, is a film about grief so precisely observed that its beauty becomes almost unbearable.
2024-08-27
Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic is remembered primarily for one thing: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro sharing a screen for the first time.
2024-08-26
Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 film is often remembered for its violence and its pink-cursive-on-the-poster aesthetic.
2024-08-25
Wes Anderson's 2014 film is often celebrated for its visual ingenuity and dismissed as style over substance.
2024-08-24
The belt is the most utilitarian accessory in a man's wardrobe, yet it sits at the visual center of the body where it divides the silhouette in two.
2024-08-16