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The Best Pop Songs of 2024
Music critics—myself included—have spent much of the past several years bemoaning the decline of capital-“E” Events in music: no new…
How “Nickel Boys” Critiques the Camera in America Cinema
Taken together, three recent films provoke a profound questioning of how and why we guard the border walls separating documentaries from…
Missing Persons: The Characters of “Nightbitch” Are Left Blank
It’s a big and bitter surprise to discover that Marielle Heller’s new film, “Nightbitch,” is, for the most part, excruciating to watch.…
Criterion Channel’s Thrillingly Evolving Roster
Richard Brody Staff writer The Criterion Channel, the foremost moveable source for art-house and repertory cinema, thrillingly expands its…
Family Discord and Holiday Music in “Cult of Love” and “No President”
The first image of Leslye Headland’s family drama,“Cult of Love,” on Broadway at the Hayes, looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauzy…
The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here
In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the…
Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love
Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in…
Remembering Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean Heyday (and Forgetting His Recent Lear)
So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to…
The Best TV Shows of 2024
For the past two decades or so, cinema’s loss has been television’s gain. As the mid-budget movie, once the natural home of grown-up fare,…
The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped
I joined Spotify, the Swedish streaming service, toward the end of 2020, spending the better part of a Sunday transferring my Apple Music…
Kendrick Lamar’s Year on Top
The film “Paid in Full,” from 2002, is a fictionalized retelling of the brief but titanic reign of three real-life New York drug kingpins…
Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust…
The Best Performances of 2024
Midway through the A24 film “Sing Sing,” Divine G, an incarcerated man played with poise and panache by Colman Domingo, appears before a…
Eric Drooker’s “A Seasonal Delivery”
As soon as December rolls around, children everywhere start keeping an eye out for the iconic red-and-white Santa outfit. And there is…
Borgo Is Worth the Trip to Manhattan
If you’re in the bar, or in the main dining room just beyond it, you might miss the kitchen’s wood-burning oven. It’s used to cook, among…
The Animals That Made It All Worth It
Like many Internet users, I love nothing more than animal content. In the decade or so since I’ve joined Instagram, I’ve probably spent…
A Photographer’s Intimate Chronicle of Home Birth
A paradox of giving birth is that you are irrefutably there—no one has ever been more there!—and yet not there at all. In all but one of…
Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2024
I love how much we humans enjoy looking back at what we recently liked and revelling in our ongoing good judgment. (A very merry Spotify…
One Conductor’s Mission to Diversify Music in “The Orchestra Chuck Built”
Chuck Dickerson, the founder and director of the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, is on a mission. “American orchestras are not…
The Best Movies of 2024
A year ago, I wasn’t sanguine about the state of ultra-low-budget filmmaking; this year, the D.I.Y. domain accounts for many of the best…
The Twenty-first Century’s Best Works of Native American History
As Ned Blackhawk points out in his National Book Award-winning “The Rediscovery of America,” most histories of the United States’ origin…
Lucy Grealy Understood What It Meant To Be Seen
Lucy Grealy was an unsparing observer of human physiognomy. She was a poet, with the requisite eye for piercing detail, but her attention…