There was a hymn we used to sing when I was a child, one of those lusty, murderous chants characteristic of the Anglican Church in its high-Victorian pomp. Written in 1894, it vibrates with imperial c ...

Mayor John Lindsay declared war on New York’s graffiti in 1972. It was a curious move, even in an era known for unwinnable conflicts. Many residents hated graffiti, of course, but it didn’t lack for f ...

Was Robert Musil right with his sardonic quip “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”? Cenotaphs, triumphal arches, bronze effigies frozen in time and space: we walk right by, bare ...

The director Wes Anderson is making a movie in a large studio in the East End of London while seated at his desk in Montparnasse, in Paris. His workspace is as carefully arrayed as the set of one of h ...

At 9 P.M. one recent Saturday at Superiority Burger, the chef Brooks Headley was ricocheting around the dining room. A profile in GQ revealed that he clocked about thirty-five thousand steps, or rough ...

When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, sudde ...