I often despair of Netflix but was cheered by the recent release of They Cloned Tyrone, a quasi-sci-fi, detective-revenge, dark comedy focused on three characters: Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer taking care of his mom and a young boy; Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a sex worker; and Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who is […]
“Let’s meet at my club,” he said. “The Lambs.” I had no idea what The Lambs was, but the thought of meeting Kevin Fitzpatrick at his club delighted me. Any attempt to explain why will sound snooty—clubs imply privilege and exclusivity. But they also suggest, if you remember the clubhouses of childhood and […]
“The rich get richer and the poor get—children,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby. Nothing illustrates the truth of that more than the stage of the Major League Baseball season called the trade deadline. Baseball generates more of a hullabaloo about trading players than any other team sport. It is […]
The wicker basket, the plastic champagne glasses, the cute little napkins printed with ants…will all have to wait. St. Louis’s air is clotted with humidity, barely breathable, and the sun belongs in Death Valley. We have entered the dog days, terribly misnamed because any dog with sense just sleeps through them. I close […]
The cover is black, with a velvety suede feel, and the notebook—excuse me, journal—closes with a clean magnetic snap. A pen could slide into the side loop and feel at home. The paper is smooth and heavy, with the faint, rich speckle of vanilla bean ice cream. In all, an unusually fine notebook […]
It might seem appropriate that one of the stories that have come out of the release of the movie Oppenheimer is that when it is shown as director Christopher Nolan intended, it arrives at the movie theater as a 600-pound, 11-mile-long strip of film. How Nolan intended it, in 70mm format, can only […]
Beautiful and silly, these elephant ears. Do your ears hang low, do they wobble to and fro? Close my eyes and I can see the elephant that inspired them, wrinkly brownish gray, standing in the middle of our concrete-slab patio with improbable grace. They are sanguine creatures, thick-skinned and self-content, yet sensitive, good […]
I am not trying to hold back the tide they say will lift all boats, nor do I mean to impede America’s economic hegemony. But I am a very bad consumer: I no longer value owning most things, and I am averse by long bitter experience to being in debt for them. I […]
One small moment, in a stack of far more momentous moments, captures my attention in the darkened theater. A woman onstage, part of a TV panel assembled to grill a doctor for her alleged insensitivity to race and religion, introduces herself as “specializing in the study of post-colonial social politics”—and the audience cracks […]
Agnes Callard is someone I want to like. A woman in philosophy who writes clearly and readably about topics important to us all, and does so with honesty and humor? Rare, and to be treasured. Except she keeps pissing me off. First, a profile by Rachel Aviv—who always probes with sensitivity and intelligence—leaves […]
