Books, Arts, and Culture

Late in the afternoon of March 27, 1964, members of the community theater group in Anchorage, Alaska, were preparing for that evening’s performance of Our Town,...

In the 1920s and 1930s several groups and individuals sought Pablo Picasso’s loyalty. Among them, John Richardson writes in A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years,...

A decade ago, a friend of mine attended a party at the SoHo loft of the Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes on the occasion of his relaunch...

In the classic espionage novel, there are certain day jobs that make an ideal cover for spies: foreign correspondent, trade delegate, cultural attaché. But the star...

November 10, 2021: Twenty Israeli settlers, armed with guns and clubs, their faces masked, descend upon the hamlet of Halat al-Dab’ in the South Hebron hills....

In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross writes about what he calls “Wagner scenes” in literature—episodes in which a young concertgoer is spiritually transformed by an...

Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if brutally reductive title for this unsparing depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Lisbon, executed by the Portuguese writer...

In 1793 the French mathematician, intellectual, and moderate revolutionary the Marquis de Condorcet, who had hoped that the Revolution could bring about a peaceful era of...

At the small family practice in Edinburgh where I work as a physician, I happen to be the only male staff member—all my medical, nursing, and...