Style

“Dedication,” by Karan Mahajan
“After my father stopped breathing, God bless his memory, I covered his body up in blankets—and kept studying.” Source link
Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics
On June 24, at 6:50 A.M., Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social that might otherwise have been reserved for a diplomatic cable or at least a highly...
Finding a Family of Boys
In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys...
Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever?The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and...
What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925
Several months before the first issue of The New Yorker appeared, Harold Ross’s fund-raising prospectus promised, along with much else, that “Judgment will be passed upon new books of...
What I Learned from My Mother and the U.S. Postal Service
Let me tell you about my mother. For twenty-five years, five, sometimes six, days a week, she drove the same fifty miles, following the main roads and back roads...
A Pioneering Photographer Revives Her Slide Show of Lesbian Life
For several years, starting in 1979, the photographer Joan E. Biren, or JEB, travelled around presenting a slide show that she’d spent years building. “I started touring at a...
“Prince Faggot” Sends Up Kink and Country
On a blue-lit stage, a naked man—blindfolded, trussed, and gagged—hangs like a deer from a pole. Pale and gleaming, he looks like a painting of St. Sebastian, rapturous in...
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts
In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style...
Glory and Gore in “Afternoons of Solitude”
You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. Full disclosure: I...
Ben Shahn, the Lefty Artist Who Was Left Behind
From the late nineteen-forties through the mid-fifties, Ben Shahn was one of the most in-demand artists in America. Whether you were mailing a package at a post office, flipping...
Bach’s Colossus
Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as if figures in a cathedral frieze...