
To be discussed by others can confer status; it can just as easily strip status away.
In August, 1918, Virginia Woolf spent a quiet stretch at Asheham, the country house that she and her husband, Leonard, rented in rural Sussex. “We’ve been practically alone, which has a very spiritual effect upon the mind,” Woolf wrote to a friend, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell. “No gossip, no malevolence, no support from one’s fellow creatures.” After six months spent in such isolation, Woolf quipped, “I should be a kind of Saint, and Leonard an undoubted prophet. We should shed virtue on people as we walked along the roads.” Alas, any pretensions to holiness had been dispelled by the arrival of house guests the previous evening: “I had such a bath of the flesh that I am far from unspotted this morning. We gossiped for 5 hours.”
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Denne historien er fra March 24, 2025-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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THE FRENZY Joyce Carol Oates
Early afternoon, driving south on the Garden State Parkway with the girl beside him.

UPDATED KENNEDY CENTER 2025 SCHEDULE
April 1—A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” with Lauren Boebert and Kid Rock

YOU MAD, BRO?
Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS BETTING ON THE FUTURE
Lucy Dacus after boygenius.

STEAL, ADAPT, BORROW
Jonathan Anderson transformed Loewe by radically reinterpreting classic garments. Is Dior next?

INHERIT THE PLAY
The return of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Ghosts.”

LEAVE WITH DESSERT
Graydon Carter’s great magazine age.

INTERIORS
The tyranny of taste in Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection.”

Naomi Fry on Jay McInerney's "Chloe's Scene"
As a teen-ager, long before I lived in New York, I felt the city urging me toward it. N.Y.C., with its art and money, its drugs and fashion, its misery and elation—how tough, how grimy, how scary, how glamorous! For me, one of its most potent siren calls was “Chloe’s Scene,” a piece written for this magazine, in 1994, by the novelist Jay McInerney, about the then nineteen-year-old sometime actress, sometime model, and all-around It Girl Chloë Sevigny.