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Our Crowd: In the Arena and in the News
The Elder Statesman of Latin American Literature
“Shall we sit outside?” Mario Vargas Llosa asked me, gesturing through the library’s floor-to-ceiling windows at the brilliant September afternoon. The only Peruvian ever to have won a Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa now lives in an eight-bedroom mansion on the fringes of Madrid, in the neighborhood known as Puerta de Hierro. When I arrived, a […]
This Is What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like
CORONA, Calif.—Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Saturday, she goes down to the local grocery store and hands out samples, earning $50 a day, because she needs the money. “I’m a working woman again,” she told me, in the common […]
America at Home: Grandparents in the Attic, Children in the Basement
On a Sunday evening a few weeks back, Shobana Ram was loading the dishwasher in her kitchen in Queens when her 85-year-old father-in-law rose from the dinner table, carrying his cane in one hand and an empty plate in the other. “From the corner of my eye, I saw him stumble and lose his balance,” […]
The Karmic Connection Between Ravi and George
There is no easy explanation for such vastly dissimilar people as George (Harrison) and Ravi Shankar instantly connecting with each other, almost as if their relationship was preordained. Their family backgrounds were completely different. The Beatle was the son of a bus conductor father and a shop assistant mother, both with modest means and even […]
‘The Twilight Zone,’ from A to Z
The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on, and the weather forecast is “more of the same, only hotter.” Despite the unbearable day-to-reality of constant […]
For Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nearly 100, the Beat Goes On
FERLINGHETTI’S GREATEST POEMS By Lawrence Ferlinghetti Edited by Nancy J. Peters. 144 pp. New Directions. $16.95. ONE DAY WHEN I was about 14 or 15 and wandering the aisles of a bookstore in Southern California, my eyes were drawn to “Endless Life,” a collection of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I grew up in a conservative […]
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Opens Up About #MeToo, Voting Rights, and Millennials
Jeffrey Rosen: What are your thoughts on the #MeToo movement and will it prove lasting progress for women’s equality? Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was a question I was asked this afternoon at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. What I wanted to convey there was that sexual harassment of women has gone on forever, but […]
We Could Be Heroes: Clint Eastwood’s “The 15:17 to Paris,” Reviewed
The new Clint Eastwood movie, “The 15:17 to Paris,” may be the weirdest film of the year. It’s a thrusting reactionary fable that ends up bumping into the rear of the avant-garde. If the outlaw Josey Wales had put on white makeup and retrained as a mime artist, I couldn’t have been more surprised. The […]
The Republicans Have Found Their New Hillary Clinton
Partway through Nancy Pelosi’s record-breaking immigration floor speech on Wednesday, her own caucus began to chafe. “There’s all kinds of ways, I assure you, that leadership exercises its influence—the least of which is a floor speech,” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez vented to Politico. Others saw the speech as a shrewd bit of politicking designed to soften […]
The Tina Brown Diaries
“There is no such thing as a succès d’estime in America. That’s why it is a French phrase.” Tina Brown never lacked for success in the American fame-and-money sense of the word. Yet for all the acclaim that has come the way of this legendary magazine editor, Brown has also been persistently underestimated. Brown observes […]
Stephen Shore, Seer of the Everyday
Most photographers use the camera as a tool of memorialization. They choose which moments to rescue from the enormous trash heap of everyday existence, by referencing some sort of defined visual hierarchy, a scaling of what scenes deserve to be immortalized. A “good” photograph happens when reality lines up in a way that is more […]
A Kingdom from Dust- The Empire of Stewart Resnick
On a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley, 101 in the shade, I merge onto Highway 99 past downtown Fresno and steer through the vibrations of heat. I’m headed to the valley’s deep south, to a little farmworker town in a far corner of Kern County called Lost Hills. This is where the biggest […]