CATEGORIES

THE COLLECTOR

Bonnie Slotnick, the downtown food-history savant.

LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST

The forgotten history of sex in America.

LIVING UNDER A ROCK

A geologist reflects on her life.

THE PARTICLES OF ORDER

The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon.

BUNKER MENTALITY

Shopping for a home at the end of the world.

LIFE OF THE PARTY

The Democrats seem rejuvenated by their new candidate. Why was it so hard to get one?

A GUIDE TO BRAT SUMMER

This summer, we’ve found ourselves in an unprecedented era of Brat.

THE LAST DAY

How declining enrollment threatens education nationwide.

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.

Sea Change- Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.

In 2019, a plaque was erected to commemorate the first glacier in Iceland to shrink so much that it could no longer be considered a glacier. Like the tsunami stones of the past, the plaque carried a message for the future, a warning to believe in changes that might at first seem implausible. It also carried a recognition of responsibility. “In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

My Life's Work- All I have in the world is a paternal aunt and a tank of fish that love me. And my work. I'm nobody.

Who am I? I’m nobody. I was cut from every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college.

OUT OF THE PAST

At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.”

FUTURE IMPERFECT

“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face.

THE NARAYANS

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice.

THE INFILTRATORS

Who’ leading the way in investigating far-right extremists: FBI. agents or leftist vigilantes?

Love Trouble Is My Business- “President Reagan resembled a bashful cowboy the other day when he was asked about the apparent collapse of the ‘Star Wars' talks with the Soviet Union. . . .

Francis X. Clines, in the Sunday Times . . . : “President Reagan resembled a bashful cowboy the other day when he was asked about the apparent collapse of the ‘Star Wars’ talks with the Soviet Union. . . .

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.

CHABLIS Donald Barthelm

My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.

A CRACK IN THE GREASEPAINT

How \"Saturday Night Live\" breaks the mold.

TALKING DIRTY

Chelsea Handler sexes up late night.

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.

PRYOR LOVE

The life and times of America's comic prophet of race.

DEAD MAN LAUGHING

Jokes run through a family.

CORRECTIONS

Because of an editing error, an article in Friday’s theatre section transposed the identifications of two people involved in the production of “Waiting for Bruce,” a farce now in rehearsal at the Rivoli. Ralph W. Murtaugh, Jr., a New York attorney, is one of the play’s financial backers.

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.

Me, Lania - Melania Trump to Tell Her Story in Memoir, "Melania," Scheduled for This Fall —Associated Press.

As a little girl in Slovenia, I had the same dreams as any child: to immigrate to America on a bogus "genius visa," to model acrylic sweaters in a catalogue, and to meet a rich man almost twice my age and enter into a financially advantageous marriage with as little physical contact as possible.

IN DEEP

“Lady in the Lake,” on Apple TV+.

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.