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Critic’s Notebook

Warped Ways of Seeing “P.O.V.”

How our ideas about point of view got all turned around.
The Weekend Essay

Why Do Doctors Write?

For physicians, curiosity and care spill easily onto the page.
Infinite Scroll

“Mountainhead” Channels the Absurdity of the Tech Bro

In Jesse Armstrong’s new satire, tech is never morally in the black, and the people who create it are no better than despots—inept ones, at that.
Open Questions

What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I.

In “I, Robot,” three Laws of Robotics align artificially intelligent machines with humans. Could we rein in chatbots with laws of our own?

Books

Books

What Did the Pop Culture of the Two-Thousands Do to Millennial Women?

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest and most ambitious in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.
Books

The Wizard Behind Hollywood’s Golden Age

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.
Books

Briefly Noted

“Apocalypse,” “The End Is the Beginning,” “The Book of Records,” and “The River Is Waiting.”
Page-Turner

What We’re Reading This Summer: Mega-Reads

New Yorker writers on long, immersive books that are worth the plunge.

Movies

The Front Row

The Sixties Come Back to Life in “Everything Is Now”

J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.
The Front Row

“Ballerina” Leaps Into John Wick’s Bloody World

Ana de Armas energizes this turbulent but thinned-out spinoff from the Keanu Reeves martial-arts franchise.
The Front Row

“Love Letters,” Received Forty Years Too Late

Amy Holden Jones’s 1983 melodrama should have established her as a major Hollywood director, but, as a female filmmaker, she faced rejection.
Critic’s Notebook

Is “Thunderbolts*” Marvel’s Attempt to Salvage the Superhero Genre?

The film succeeds in part by flipping the franchise’s standard script: the main characters aren’t embarrassed because they’re superheroes; they’re embarrassed because they’re not.

Food

The Food Scene

What’s a Neighborhood Restaurant Without a Neighborhood?

Confidant is hoping to draw diners to the sprawling Brooklyn mall known as Industry City.
On and Off the Menu

The Self-Taught Cook Who Mastered the Flour Tortilla

Some of the best Sonoran-style tortillas in the U.S. are being made far from the border, in a college town forty miles outside Kansas City.
The Food Scene

Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer

Most sundaes are satisfying, but only a select subset are truly special.
The Food Scene

Times Square’s Revolving Restaurant Comes Around Again

Can Danny Meyer make the View transcend its touristy gimmick?
Listen to lively debates about the art of the moment.Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts »
Photo Booth

Iran’s Daughters of the Sea

Forough Alaei’s stunning photographs of a community of fisherwomen on a remote island in the Persian Gulf.

Television

On Television

The Finale of “The Rehearsal” Is Outlandish and Sublime

The first season of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending show seemed to exhaust all possibilities for its conceit. But the second is, somehow, even more berserk than the first.
On Television

The Emotional Seesaw of the Knicks’ Playoff Run

After powering through to the Eastern Conference Finals, New York’s Knickerbockers raised hopes in Game One—then caved to the Indiana Pacers in the final seconds.
On Television

“Overcompensating” Is a New Kind of Coming-Out Comedy

Benito Skinner’s Prime Video series about a closeted jock starts off as a satire of toxic masculinity—and lands somewhere surprisingly sweet.
Letter from Trump’s Washington

A Day in the Live-Streamed Life of Donald Trump

America’s TV-obsessed President has made his rambling Oval Office press gaggles the signature of his second term—chaotic, self-aggrandizing, random, and frequently nasty.

The Theatre

The Theatre

Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber Star in a Pair of Psychosexual Slugfests

The spirit of August Strindberg infuses Hannah Moscovitch’s “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes” and Jen Silverman’s adaptation of “Creditors.”
Personal History

When a Writer Takes to the Stage

A one-man show, a box of old stories, and the strange intimacy of talking to a room full of strangers.
The Theatre

Jeremy Jordan Mines “Floyd Collins” for Its Sonic Gems

Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s 1996 musical about a trapped caver resurfaces on Broadway, and Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Mona Pirnot play metaphysical games.
The Lede

The Show Can’t Go On

Funding shifts at three of the largest philanthropic foundations have brought turbulence and uncertainty to the intricate New York support system for the performing arts.

Music

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”

The musician talks with Amanda Petrusich about his two new albums of ambient music, and his book “What Art Does,” a pocket-size argument for the value of feelings in our lives.
Musical Events

The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”

Two New York productions of Strauss’s opera reposition its necrophiliac protagonist as a perverse instrument of justice.
Pop Music

Pavement Inspires a Strange, Loving Bio-Pic

The band was willfully ironic and averse to canonization. An aggressively heady new movie it inspired, “Pavements,” thumbs its nose at the epic rock bio-pic.
The Lede

Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single

Spotify and YouTube barred the song, which salutes Hitler, from their platforms. It found its audience, anyway.

More in Culture

The Current Cinema

“Materialists” Is a Thoughtful Romantic Drama That Doesn’t Quite Add Up

In Celine Song’s follow-up to “Past Lives,” Dakota Johnson plays a New York City matchmaker caught between a designer Mr. Right and an impoverished ex-boyfriend.
Cover Story

Haruka Aoki’s “Nothing to See”

It’s good to be a cat.
Pop Music

Taylor Swift’s Master Plan

In a bid to gain control over her own music, the singer-songwriter rerecorded most of her old studio albums. Then she bought the old ones back. What do we do with the Taylor’s Versions now?
Goings On

The Heartrending Movies of John Cazale

Also: Sister Nancy’s eternal party, the acoustic sculptures of Jennie C. Jones on the Met roof, American Ballet Theatre’s season at the Met, and more.
Pop Music

Miley Cyrus Finally Makes an Album Worthy of Her Voice

“Something Beautiful” may be the pop star’s first record to fully take advantage of the unusual array of sonic colors she is able to draw upon.
Page-Turner

Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern?

A new memoir by the former Prime Minister revisits her time in office but doesn’t explain the confounding transformation the country underwent during COVID.
Book Currents

Sarah Ruhl’s Guides in Life and Art

The poet and playwright, who has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, discusses four books by her closest teachers.
Under Review

Alison Bechdel and the Search for the Beginner’s Mind

With the cartoonist’s new graphic novel, she appears once again to be trying for the “light, fun” book she’s longed to write.
Blitt’s Kvetchbook

Genius on the Half Shell

Portrait of a President.
Artist’s Notebook

How the Broadway Musical “Maybe Happy Ending” Creates Visual Magic

The scenic designer Dane Laffrey on the inspiration he found while travelling in Tokyo and the ideas that led to the groundbreaking set design of the Broadway musical, which stars Darren Criss and Helen J. Shen.