The Magazine
July 22, 2024
Goings On
Goings On
Tadáskía’s Awe-Inspiring Art, at MOMA
Also: Dorrance Dance, “From Here,” Charley Crockett, and more.
The Food Scene
The Central Park Boathouse Is Back, and It’s Perfectly Fine
Recently reopened under new management, the pricey tourist-bait canteen is more satisfying than it has any right to be.
By Helen Rosner
The Talk of the Town
Evan Osnos on the Joe Biden dilemma; swimming the Seine; rescuing historic signs; Wilco in the Berkshires; relic hunters.
Comment
F.D.R.’s Election Lessons for Joe Biden and the Democrats
Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.
By Evan Osnos
Testing the Waters
A (Covert) Pre-Olympics Dip in the E. Coli-Infested Seine
Tired of the stalling of French officials who’d vowed to swim in Paris’s purportedly clean waters, one American expat takes matters into his own hands.
By Lauren Collins
Dept. of Keeping
Where New York’s Signs and Marquees Go When They Die
Bummed by today’s aesthetic monoculture, David Barnett is personally cobbling together the permanent collection of the New York Sign Museum.
By Laura Preston
At the Festivals
The Art of the Dibs
An attendee with a balky back at the Solid Sound music festival seeks Jeff Tweedy’s counsel on joint replacements and the ethics of claiming viewing space with a folding chair.
By Nick Paumgarten
Atlanta Postcard
How to Find Civil War Skeletons Under Your Condo
After burst water mains caused an “aqua apocalypse” in Atlanta, one relic hunter used the extensive digging for repairs as an opportunity to search for lost treasures.
By Charles Bethea
Reporting & Essays
Annals of the Sea
Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order—or Its Secret Sharers?
We’ve long viewed them as liberty-loving rebels. But it’s time to take off the eye patch.
By Daniel Immerwahr
Onward and Upward with Technology
How Lawrence Abu Hamdan Hears the World
The artist and audio investigator, who calls himself a “private ear,” investigates crimes that are heard but not seen.
By Doreen St. Félix
Letter from Washington
Inside the Trump Plan for 2025
A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House.
By Jonathan Blitzer
Our Local Correspondents
Paradise Bronx
From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
By Ian Frazier
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
Bot Therapy
He was a widower who had lost his wife to cancer and his only son in a hideous boating accident. He worked in a bunker in Paris. I took the bait.
By Mary Norris
Fiction
Fiction
“Freedom to Move”
“Is our boy full?” Ketevan asked. “Grandfather’s diet is very strict. No dessert, no bread. Meat to feed a bird. But our boy loves to eat. Let him enjoy himself.”
By Ayşegül Savaş
The Critics
Books
1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing
A new book claims that a few big summer movies heralded an epochal shift in the motion-picture industry, but is that really how cultural history works?
By Anthony Lane
Books
The Original Bluestockings Were Fiercer Than You Imagined
In eighteenth-century England, a cohort of intellectual women braved vicious mockery. But when it came to policing propriety, they could dish it out, too.
By Margaret Talbot
Books
Briefly Noted
“The God of the Woods,” “Gretel and the Great War,” “They Called It Peace,” and “The Friday Afternoon Club.”
Pop Music
Clairo Believes in Charm as an Aesthetic and Spiritual Principle
The artist discusses her new album, moving upstate, and the wallop and jolt of romantic connection.
By Amanda Petrusich
Dancing
Does Ballet Need Narrative?
“Woolf Works,” a dance triptych by Wayne McGregor, is based on the life and work of Virginia Woolf, but its engagement with her ideas is frustratingly intermittent.
By Jennifer Homans
The Current Cinema
“Sing Sing” Puts a Prison Theatre Program in the Spotlight
Greg Kwedar’s film, starring Colman Domingo and Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, brings us deep—though not deep enough—into the process of rehabilitation through art.
By Justin Chang
Poems
Poems
“Port of Havana”
“in the distance / a boat heads off to carve / into the navel of the sky”
By Nancy Morejón
Poems
“Dead Reckoning”
“We are driving the Middle West, lost / as Oklahoma or Kansas slowly spins / into darkness.”
By Anthony Walton
Cartoons
Puzzles & Games
The Mail
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