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I moved to New York City in 2014 with only one book: Paper Lion, by George Plimpton. All of my other books were left behind in San Francisco. I was shipping my belongings cross-country and had reduced them to fit just three large boxes and a big suitcase. That copy
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Next week I am doing one of the bravest things a person can do: I am moving from one apartment to another. This is an objectively positive decision in my life. My monthly rent obligations will be slashed. I’ll live somewhere that is a better social fit for me.
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The weather in Brooklyn has been nice this week. The weather is what you talk about when you don’t know what else to say, right? Many of you pay to read this newsletter, so I want to note that I have been managing some health issues over the last
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You know those scenes in movies where there’s a huge sudden explosion and the people on the periphery of it throw their eyes wide as their hair blows from the sudden bubble of energy? That was me, wearing a knockoff 1994-1995 Manchester City jersey, as Liam and Noel Gallagher
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Rolling my suitcase down the streets of Manchester, I had an intrusive thought that will stick with me all weekend: what the hell am I doing here? It’s impossible to overstate what an absolute, unabashed loser I am when it comes to Oasis. Their songs make me happy. They
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Every day I wake up and grab for my phone in the early seconds of consciousness. I swipe it open it while squinting in the suddenly bright light and start taking my morning misery tour. I open my email account and see reminders of things I'm procrastinating and
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Finding myself in a great book has been my primary source of comfort since the moment I learned how to read. Now, I can hardly tolerate the books that line my shelves. My literary realm is best described as “women in states of transition.” A truer description would be “women
Notes on the moments that make life meaningful.
It’s the perfect time to celebrate the United States of America! Who could feel questionable about the concept of patriotism at a time like this? Personally, I feel pretty good about the long weekend we’re getting for Independence Day. There will be brilliantly nice weather in New York
If I have no particular fondness for Joan Didion, why did I spend weeks looking through her recipes, letters, and reporting notebooks? The short answer is that I was looking for a story I could pitch to a major publication. Didion’s personal effects were semi-recently made available to the
The quietest scenes in “Sorry, Baby” speak the loudest. The film, which is actor and writer Eva Victor’s directorial debut, portrays a person — Agnes — whose life shrinks to solitude following a sexual assault. In the years following their1 rape by their grad school advisor, we rarely see the highs
You can’t enter a New York City museum without engaging with the concept of “American art” this summer. There’s the Rashid Johnson exhibition at the Guggenheim. Amy Sherald gets a stunning and surreal floor at the Whitney. The Met is showing a career-spanning exhibition on John Singer Sargent,
My friends and I were enjoying a stellar first-day-of-summer night outside of a dive bar in lower Manhattan when we learned the United States is headed back to war in the Middle East. The three of us had an immediate, vocal reaction to the news that hit us suddenly. We
Celine Song took on a difficult task in her effort to make a rom-com about pragmatic 30-somethings looking for love. "Materialists," the result of that effort, seems generated by a focus group, not a fantasy. "Materialists" was, to an extent, a step forward from her first
How far would you go to escape your deepest well of pain? Then, what would you do if it followed you to the furthest place you could reach? These are the questions that shape “Solaris,” the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky. A loose adaptation of the 1961 book of the
Three days ago I wrote a piece about Turnstile, a band that I don’t like. I have regretted publishing that essay from the moment it went live. But I know that once something exists on the internet, you can’t get it back. Barring new developments about the topic
In my late teenage years, I had a digital bootleg version of “SMiLE” that has now been lost to the graveyard of my old laptops. By that time, Brian Wilson had found it within himself to play the “SMiLE” songs live and by himself in London in 2002, but the
A few years ago, David Byrne — a New York City mascot who once had a band — took a planned break during his Broadway run of “American Utopia” to ask everyone in the audience who had actually voted in the most recent local election. Of all the eligible local voters in
