The Magazine
July 8 & 15, 2024
Love & Heartbreak
Love & Heartbreak
Weeping at the Lake Palace
I tried to compete with my rivals by spending money.
By Akhil Sharma
Love & Heartbreak
Bound Together
I felt that I was being tied to the women in my family, those who had come before and those yet to come.
By Edwidge Danticat
Love & Heartbreak
Up the Stairs
Granddad had apparently taken the bus quite a distance and walked very far that day, to reach a certain apartment building.
By Shuang Xuetao
Love & Heartbreak
Lost Stories
I promised myself that I would not write memoir again; it was too strenuous, too costly, too harmful, no matter how cathartic it might be.
By Donald Antrim
Love & Heartbreak
Diorama of Love
Love is wherever love is felt, and with love being a complete statement, well, that’s enough.
By Addie Citchens
Goings On
Goings On
A Little Bit of Everything at Lincoln Center’s “Summer for the City”
Also: Nancy Pelosi vs. A.O.C. in “N/A,” the observant folk of Cassandra Jenkins, Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer,” and more.
Photo Booth
Lyle Ashton Harris’s Scrapbooks of the Self
The artist’s knotty, intimate archive is on display at the Queens Museum.
By Vince Aletti
The Talk of the Town
Jonathan Blitzer on rights for U.S. citizens’ spouses; a loft-jazz tour; Steve McQueen is here to work; environmental stewardship; novel campaign funding.
Comment
Finally, a Leap Forward on Immigration Policy
President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade.
By Jonathan Blitzer
Sentimental Journey
Alan Braufman’s Loft-Jazz Séance
The composer and saxophonist tours what remains of the clubs and run-down apartments (now delis and clothing stores) of the downtown scene of the seventies.
By Nick Paumgarten
Art Work
Steve McQueen Is an Art Doer
In town for a Dia Beacon installation, the visual artist and “12 Years a Slave” director commuted five hours each day and expounded on the virtues of doing stuff instead of thinking about doing stuff.
By Victoria Uren
Near-Misses Dept.
How to Survive Lions and Bears and Racism in Nature
Rae Wynn-Grant, the host of “Wild Kingdom” and author of “Wild Life,” recounts the times she nearly died.
By Mark Yarm
Sketchpad
High-Roller Presidential Donor Perks
Give now to get your name on the wing of a fighter jet!
By Brendan Loper
Reporting & Essays
Annals of Publishing
Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic
In ten years, the London publishing house has amassed devoted readers—and four writers with Nobel Prizes.
By Rebecca Mead
Personal History
The Last Rave
“If to dust we return / And we do / Why spend a minute / Choosing wallpaper.”
By Emily Witt
Fiction
Fiction
“The Drummer Boy on Independence Day”
An indispensable part of the ceremony, of course, was the Civil War veteran, and at the time I’m telling about we still had one—a Confederate, naturally.
By E. L. Doctorow
Fiction
“Kaho”
He may have been patiently waiting, for the longest time, for me to show up in front of him, she thought. Like an enormous spider waiting for its prey in the dark.
By Haruki Murakami
Fiction
“Opening Theory”
Looking over at her, he starts to smile again—revising, she thinks, the presumption of failure.
By Sally Rooney
Fiction
“The Hadal Zone”
Arwen’s last thought before sleep is that he is in a twisting cyclonic fall down through the ocean trench to become a compressed speck of matter. It feels good.
By Annie Proulx
The Critics
Pop Music
Ivan Cornejo’s Mexican American Heartache
“Regional Mexican” music is booming, but one young singer is in no mood to celebrate.
By Kelefa Sanneh
A Critic at Large
Norman Maclean Didn’t Publish Much. What He Did Contains Everything
You could read his literary output in a single day, yet it includes almost all there is to know about what the English language can do.
By Kathryn Schulz
Books
The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories
“Consent,” by Jill Ciment, and “Change,” by Édouard Louis, revisit the past with an eye for distortion and error.
By Parul Sehgal
Books
Briefly Noted
“The Silence of the Choir,” “In Tongues,” “Woman of Interest,” and “The Museum of Other People.”
Books
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Scabrous Satire of the Super-Rich
In “Long Island Compromise,” wealth is a curse. Or is that just what we’d like to think?
By Jennifer Wilson
The Theatre
“Cats: The Jellicle Ball” Lands on Its Feet
The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch cross Andrew Lloyd Webber’s juggernaut musical with queer ballroom culture to electrifying effect.
By Helen Shaw
On Television
“The Boys” Gets Too Close for Comfort
The Amazon Prime series started as a fantastical, darkly funny sendup of the superhero genre. Now it’s set in a political landscape that looks distressingly like our own.
By Inkoo Kang
The Current Cinema
Kevin Costner’s “Horizon” Goes West but Gets Nowhere
The actor-director’s three-hour Western, the first installment of a planned tetralogy, rushes through its many stories and straight past American history.
By Richard Brody
Poems
Poems
“Wallpaper Poem”
“If to dust we return / And we do / Why spend a minute / Choosing wallpaper.”
By Phillis Levin
Cartoons
1/16
“Maybe we shouldn’t have made ‘Moby-Dick’ into a pop-up book.”
Cartoon by Sam Gross
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“You just had to develop passive-aggressive expressionism, didn’t you?”
Cartoon by Colin Tom
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Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
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“I’m just lying here quietly in the dark trying to minimize my carbon footprint.”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
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“Instead of careful interpretation of the prose, maybe try pronouncing even the most basic words like an insane person?”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
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“Yes, are you guys getting MRI patients at the water park?”
Cartoon by Paul Noth
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Cartoon by Roz Chast
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“It doesn’t matter what happens to me, just get my presentation to the 9 A.M. meeting at 562 West Ninth Street, conference room C!”
Cartoon by Tim Hamilton
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“I knew I’d find you in here scheming.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
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Cartoon by Sofia Warren
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“I can make dinner if you tell me what’s for dinner.”
Cartoon by Julia Thomas
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“ . . . and this is where I store my tennis ball.”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap
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Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
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“Buck, go run home and call the university. Tell ’em we finally bred an easy-to-draw horse.”
Cartoon by Michael J. Johnson
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“You’ll be working directly under me.”
Cartoon by Sam Hurt
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“Hurry! If he gets inside that claw machine, we’ll never get him out!”
Cartoon by Jon Adams
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Puzzles & Games
The Mail
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