On entering “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Met last year, I was at first reduced to nouns and adjectives. I was overcome with description. An ensemble of an overdress and underdress for Chanel Autumn/Winter 2002–2003. The overdress, in a dark gray cashmere knit, is as formally cinched as a suit jacket. The […]

In Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, an intrepid group of Palestinians stages Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, suspicion, and revenge.

For the last century and a half the American female journalist has existed in a state of double consciousness. She could never report the news without her existence as a reporter being regarded as newsworthy, either an emblem of the profession’s progress or proof of its fall. In a gendered version of what W.E.B. Du […]

And then underneath the black strip on the canvas isa small light. I used to think the black strip was the actual painting. Now I think it’s what the black stripis covering. The covering is impossible. No matter how wide the strip is, light shines through. Somevistas just do. Barnett Newman threw most of his […]

In literature as in life, significant birthdays are occasions for both celebration and reassessment. Herman Melville’s two hundredth birthday happened to just precede the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The house arrest of so many readers for an indeterminate period resulted in many social changes, among them the sudden proliferation of book groups...

On July 13, after Thomas Matthew Crooks fired multiple shots at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the world saw the difference between presence of mind and absence of mind. Trump, who was shot in the right ear, gave an extraordinary demonstration of the first of these qualities. He flinched as he felt the bullet. […]