1,908 stories from The New Yorker
The urban kingdom of Washington Heights is an unlikely Eden where the stately European echoes of Beaux-Arts architecture clash with the extroverted expressions of the Latin-American diaspora…
"We didn't need dialogue," Norma Desmond tells a young screenwriter in "Sunset Boulevard," recalling her silent-film-era glory days. "We had faces!" Screenwriters famously suffer all sorts o…
"Actors aren't animals! They're human beings!" the wise producer Leo Bloom once said, to which his partner, Max Bialystock, replied, "They are? Have you ever eaten with one?" Most of the Osc…
For a certain stripe of Oscar obsessive"c'est moi"it's all about actresses. A healthy variety of tough, sly, vulnerable, funny, chilling female performances signals that the state of the cin…
In the days leading up to her performance at the Super Bowl halftime show, pundits speculated about whether or not the pop star Lady Gaga"who has long advocated for misfits, throwing her con…
Earlier this week, it was announced that the B Street Band""the original Springsteen tribute band""would be performing at the Garden State Presidential Inaugural Gala, one of several semifor…
When "Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" opened on Broadway, in 1968, it featured one of the best young casts ever to appear in an American musical. Diane Keaton, Melba Moore, and …
What a strange and contradictory"and not unentertaining"thing the Golden Globes were to watch last night. On the one hand, "La La Land," a Hollywood movie musical about the magic of Hollywoo…
A few years before writing "Guys and Dolls," which premièred in 1950, Frank Loesser put his sizable talents to work for Uncle Sam, when the U.S. Army hired him to collaborate on a series of…
"If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable," Carrie Fisher, who died yesterday, at the age of sixty, wrote in her memoir "Wishful Drinking," from 2008. Fisher's…
On a recent weeknight in midtown Manhattan, the Broadway actor Kelvin Moon Loh led a rehearsal of "The Mikado," one of the most popular works by the nineteenth-century duo W. S. Gilber…
Ruth Draper was born in New York in 1884. When she was very young, she entertained her siblings by sitting on a window seat in the nursery of her family's brownstone, on East Forty-seventh S…
August Wilson's life work was his "Century Cycle," a ten-play portrait of black life in Pittsburgh's Hill District, each set in a different decade. ("Fences," the nineteen-fifties entry, is …
The Academy Awards officially need a rabbi. How else to navigate the thorny ethics that seem to sprout up each year around the question of separating the artist from the art? Of course, this…
Simon McBurney has two phones. In his dressing room at the Golden Theatre, on Broadway, they're both ringing. He cuts off one call, answers the other, then apologizes, scans his messages, an…
When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical "Lady in the Dark," in 1940, Freud was big. The great man's thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psychoanalys…
The director Damien Chazelle's notion of artistic power isn't merely inseparable from his notion of will power; it's the very embodiment of it"louder, faster, and alone are his standards of …
Jane Klain, the indefatigable research manager at the Paley Center for Media, which houses a vast collection of old television and radio programs, goes on archival treasure hunts that someti…
Onstage & off Plunkett's ability to inhabit & portray experience has an almost tactile, corporeal quality. Her performances have the kind of intelligence & emotional range that prods an audi…
Early in 2010, Cheryl Strayed got an e-mail from an acquaintance, Steve Almond, who wrote an advice column"Dear Sugar"for the literary Web site The Rumpus. Strayed was living in Portland wit…
Boy meets girl, stuck in a traffic jam, and honks at her. Girl gives boy the finger. Boy drives on. Boy meets girl again, in a bar, and brushes past. Girl thinks boy is a jerk. Boy meets gir…
Oscar winners aren't the best barometers by which to gauge the national mood. Movies and politics work at different speeds, reshaping themselves"and absorbing each other"in unpredictable bur…
Jason Sudeikis sat at the back of the Bowery Poetry Club, waiting for open-mike night to begin. He had parked his black Vespa outside, having motored in from Clinton Hill, where he lives wit…
Throughout his career, James Baldwin had a hankering to work in show business. Like Henry James, one of his early heroes, Baldwin loved the footlights; early on, with his friend and editor S…
In the immediate aftermath of the Presidential election, as it became necessary to process an appalling new reality"What does this mean for the undocumented? What does this mean for women? W…
