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DEAD MAN LAUGHING
Jokes run through a family.
BRAVO!
\"Funny Girl.\"
LGA-ORD
Then, Beckett decided to become a commercial pilot. . . . “I think the next little bit of excitement is flying,” he wrote to McGreevy.
What's So Funny?- A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh.
A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh. How the brain processes humor remains a mystery. It’s easy to make someone smile or cry by electronically stimulating a single region of the brain, but it’s astonishingly difficult to make someone laugh. The “laughter circuit” is complex and various. Puns are processed on the left side of the brain by gyri, bumpy areas on the surface of the cerebral cortex; more complex, non-wordplay jokes are routed through gyri on the right side of the brain and also trigger electronic activity in many other parts of the brain.
The Critics - The Art World - Bad Dream - What was Surrealism really about?
What was Surrealism really about? Where are we with Surrealism, then? Quite possibly in the same plain little room where we began. The lighting is clear, the walls straight, the corners decorously right-angled. Something is off, but psychoanalysis won't help us.
PROMISED LAND
How tribal nations are reclaiming Oklahoma.
DIVORCE STORY
Sarah Manguso’ blow-by-blow account of a fracturing marriage.
THE INHERITOR
What does Robert F: Kennedy, Jr, actually want?
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
The life of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.
AFTER LONG SILENCE
Carolina Uccellis inventive 1835 opera, Anna di Resburgo,” is returned to life.
THE DEVIL TAKE IT
The Faustian bargain has quite a history—and future.
IN DEEP
“Lady in the Lake,” on Apple TV+.
THE TAIL END
Bidding farewell to a cat
Forbidden Desires - Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.
Debussy, Strauss, and a new opera about John Singer Sargent, in Des Moines.
My New Thing
My new thing is journaling. It was bullet journals, but now it’s journal bullets, which is where I make a quick note anytime I see a magazine. No, the other kind of magazine.
OUT THERE
In midlife, Gillian Anderson is proving that she’s not so buttoned-up.
STATE OF PLAY
Politics and the real” at the Festival d‘Avignon.
BORN AGAIN
The past and future of Christian fundamentalism.
PLAYING THE NUMBERS
My mother, the gambler.
UNCONVENTIONAL
No fear and loathing in Milwaukee, just confidence.
BLOOD RELATIVES
Did the U.K.’ most infamous family massacre end in a miscarriage of justice?
attila
Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.”
THE FIN AND THE FURY
Beware of sharkless waters.
What Happened To The Yuppie?– In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities
Tom McGrath's "Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation" (Grand Central) is an entertaining recap of that period. McGrath doesn't offer a novel sociological interpretation of the yuppies. What he has to say about them would have been conventional even during their time.
Old Money - How treasure from an eighteen-century shipwreck ended up in the hands of a Florida couple
How treasure from an eighteenth-century shipwreck ended up in the hands of a Florida couple.
Writing for a Warming World - Imagining the overwhelming, the ubiquitous, the world-shattering.
Climate change is one of those topics that can throw novelists—and everyone else—into a fearful and cowering silence. When the earth is losing its familiar shapes and consolations, changing drastically and in unpredictable ways beneath our feet, how can we summon our creative resources to engage in the imaginative world-building required to write a novel that takes on these threats in compelling ways? And how to avoid writing fiction that addresses irreversible climate change without letting our prose get too preachy, overly prescriptive, saturated with despair?
A YOUNG ARTIST
An Italian widow is still discovering the joy of painting at ninety-three.
BIZARRE REALITY
Julio Torres's \"Fantasmas\" finds truth in fantasy.
How Jet Democratized the Thirst Trap
When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, I knew of only one way that a mere mortal could be pictured in a bikini for paying subscribers.
GOINGS ON
What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week.