A couple of years before my grandma Bev died, in 2016, I asked her to show me how she made her challah, one specialty in an impressive culinary repertoire. She padded over to a cabinet in her kitchen and retrieved, to my great surprise, not a handwritten recipe but a yellowed clipping from a newspaper. … Read more
It’s been a long, wild trip since 1969, when the opening chords of Pete Townshend’s “Tommy,” written with and recorded by the Who, first blasted onstage. The band toured the genre-defying album—a seeker’s rock opera in which a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” discovers a messianic gift for pinball—for several years. Throughout the next decade, … Read more
If every label in “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” the eighty-first installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen? Some sections would get more confusing, of course. When you walked through the yellow-lit gallery on the museum’s sixth floor, you probably wouldn’t suppose that … Read more
It was indeed a “normal” election in that respect, responding not least to the outburst of “normal” politics with which Hitler had littered his program: he had, in the months beforehand, damped down his usual ranting about Jews and bankers and moneyed élites and the rest. He had recorded a widely distributed phonograph album (the … Read more
In 1979, a group called Women Against Pornography opened an office in what was then, in the organizers’ view, the belly of the beast: Times Square. WAP members, predominantly white feminists, who believed that porn had the power to reinforce, and even breed, misogyny, led others who shared their views on eye-opening tours of the … Read more
In August, 2003, I was living in London when a weeks-long heat wave seized much of Europe, killing tens of thousands of people. Tarmac melted on the London Orbital Motorway. Portugal lost half a million acres to forest fires. Water levels in the Danube River fell low enough to expose Nazi military ruins—a jeep, a … Read more
This new mono-God is fiercely interventionist, and he seems to possess a plan that his dim-sighted human creations can barely make out. He banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because, in disobeying his orders not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they become godlike. Of the … Read more
Mayor John Lindsay declared war on New York’s graffiti in 1972. It was a curious move, even in an era known for unwinnable conflicts. Many residents hated graffiti, of course, but it didn’t lack for fans in high places. The previous year, the Times had published an admiring profile of Taki, a teen-ager who scribbled … Read more
That same summer, McCullers began a whirlwind tour of conferences and residencies, where she charmed some of the most famous names in literature and alienated many others. At Bread Loaf, the summer writers’ conference at Middlebury College, she was an “enfant terrible,” monopolizing the conversation and drinking all of Wallace Stegner’s bourbon—when she wasn’t drinking … Read more
It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did much to hasten the end that they … Read more
