The Bucolic Heroic
A coastal hotel in Bordeaux, a Marrakesh bathhouse, the first pet cemetery in the US, a floating bar in Paris renowned for its weekly Soirées Gay:...
The God of Stories
I learned to listen to what I seeBut never quite to see what I hearAnd something has always been missingIn the hearing: glamorous truthNo that’s been...
‘Anxious for a Mayflower’
Con artists are having a moment. The latest crop features Elizabeth Holmes, the deep-voiced, unblinking leader of the fraudulent blood-testing start-up Theranos, one of many cheats...
Going on Her Nerve
Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since the late 1960s, but she has only recently...
Who’s to Blame?
Like so many of us these days, all three of these journalists are ultimately searching for the sources of the pickle we’re in. How could this...
The Hum of Humanity
Why do certain experiences lodge in our memories while others—more triumphant perhaps, or more traumatic—leave barely a trace? In his memoir, Little Did I Know, the...
Burkina Faso’s Master Builder
1. Since its creation in 1979, the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize—the highest tribute bestowed on living practitioners of the building art, likened to the Nobel Prize...
A Master at Work
“Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman,” a superb survey of ninety drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, invites us to “pull back the curtain” on David’s...
Tomorrow Is Today
On the afternoon in 1884 that New Orleans erected its principal monument to Robert E. Lee, the heavens let loose a deluge. It was February 22—George...
What Are You Looking At?
The flaneur was a familiar figure in nineteenth-century Paris: a solitary, quasi-artistic man (though not always) who strolled the streets like an urban epicure. A psychogeographer...
