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Sarah Ruhl’s Guides in Life and Art
In the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s new book, “Lessons from My Teachers,” she writes of a period in her life when she—by then a celebrated…
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Sigrid Nunez on the Beauty of Narrative Restraint
“Plot, shmot,” the writer and editor William Maxwell once said to John Updike. Sigrid Nunez couldn’t agree more. She used to tell her…
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Rumaan Alam and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Female Protagonist
The writer Rumaan Alam has noticed that readers, especially as of late, can be quick to dismiss novels that have characters they find…
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Renzo Piano’s Light Touch
The world-renowned architect Renzo Piano grew up in Italy watching his father, a local builder, work on construction sites, and he was…
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Jeff Bridges Is Digging It
The interior of Jeff Bridges’s garage, in Santa Barbara, California, has the ramshackle ease of an extravagant dorm room: a tiger-print…
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Min Jin Lee’s Indelible Twentieth-Century Women
In “Free Food for Millionaires,” Min Jin Lee’s best-selling début novel, the protagonist, Casey Han, is the ambitious daughter of Korean…
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Reëxamining Romantic Tropes with the Ripped Bodice
In 2016, Leah Koch and her sister Bea Hodges-Koch opened the Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore, in Los Angeles. Since then, the genre has…
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Fuchsia Dunlop’s Taste for Adventure
In the nineteen-nineties, Fuchsia Dunlop—now a celebrated food writer and expert in Chinese cooking—enrolled at the Sichuan Institute of…
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The Best-Selling Novelist Kaveh Akbar Leans Into His Poetic Roots
Kaveh Akbar may be best known for his début novel, “Martyr!” (a finalist for the National Book Award), but he began his career as a poet.…
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Imani Perry on Experimental Histories of Black Life
Imani Perry teaches at Harvard and is the author of “South to America,” a genre-mixing exploration of the American South, and, most…
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The Henri Cartier-Bresson of South Korea
During Han’s lifetime—he died in 1999—he was primarily known for his commercial work. In 1966, he founded Han’s Photo, one of the first…
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Ballet Past and Present, at New York City Ballet
The Cuban contemporary-dance troupe Malpaso Dance Company—skilled, sympathetic, but still searching for a strong identity—returns to its…
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Garth Risk Hallberg’s Essential Joyce Carol Oates
Like many people, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg was daunted by the size of the celebrated American writer Joyce Carol Oates’s body of…
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Sebastian Mallaby on Finance’s Intellectual Adventure Stories
Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of five books, including, most recently, “The…
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Counting Down to 2025 in N.Y.C.
Sheldon Pearce Pearce has covered music for Goings On since 2020. Celebrations abound as we wrap up yet another staggering year of…
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Luca Guadagnino’s Fascination with the Bourgeoisie
Though perhaps best known for their portrayals of desire, Luca Guadagnino’s character-driven dramas, from “Challengers” to “Call Me by…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Best Jokes of 2024
A good joke doesn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. And so…
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What to Read This Winter, According to Tattered Cover
Tattered Cover is a Denver institution. Founded in 1971, it’s now one of the U.S.’s largest independent-bookstore businesses. Kathy Baum,…
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Why Josh Brolin Loves James Joyce
The Oscar-nominated actor Josh Brolin—known for his roles in films such as “No Country for Old Men,” “Dune,” and the “Avengers”…