April 10, 2026 Arts & Culture Among the Antigones By Rhoda Feng Alessandra Lopez in Antigone in Analysis, March 19, 2026. Photograph by Marina Levitskaya. For a few weeks this spring, you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone. Perhaps it started with Robert Icke’s Oedipus, the Broadway production from February, which featured a modern-day Antigone as a sulky teen who little suspects that her father is also her brother. Soon after, four different theaters across the five boroughs staged their own renditions of Sophocles’s famous play, reimagining his two-thousand-and-five-hundred-year-old mythic figure as, variously, a pregnant teenager, an analysis patient, an incestuous home renovator, and a freedom fighter in a fascist regime in the future. The latter, in a bid to underscore the theme of rebellion across the ages, went so far as to include audio from the ICE raids in Minneapolis. Read More
February 28, 2026 Arts & Culture Tyrant Style By Thomas Morton Selfie by Giancarlo DiTrapano. Giancarlo DiTrapano was a friend, so take all this with a gram of salt. Gian had two arts at which he was preternaturally talented, what we’d’ve called his genius before that word just meant “smart guy.” One was, I guess you’d say, books. Sounds dumb, but that’s what he did and was good at. He found people who wrote, not always writers, and coaxed them into writing books that were wildly better than what the rest of the book world was crapping out in any given year. I know this probably sounds more like management than art. It’s hard to consider editing an art if you haven’t seen it being done, and publishing is full-well up the stairs at the sausage factory. The books Gian put out weren’t sausages. The writing he knew how to find and to encourage was great from sentence to sentence, that was obviously the big part of it, but the books weren’t just a casing for the writing. The books themselves were fucking Things. They were objects of care and craft—the design, the cover, the typeface, the size of the paper, the blurbs(!), everything was hand-wrought to fit perfectly together with the writing and the writer as one discrete deal, the way a Pink Floyd album in its proper sleeve is. This was at a time when smaller independent imprints would sometimes have a uniform house style that looked all right, and the major publishing houses routinely put out books that looked like slapped-together dog shit. He’d do one or two of these guys in a year, obsessing over them through the whole process, talking endlessly about them the whole way through from manuscript to galley. No one makes two sausages a year without taking a major bath on the enterprise. Read More
February 23, 2026 Arts & Culture What’s So Funny About Infinite Jest? By Lora Kelley Photograph by Slashme, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Standing beside a shelf of bestsellers with some friends at McNally Jackson Seaport in downtown Manhattan, Meg Charlton, a writer, recalled the time a man sat down next to her at a café, pulled out a copy of Infinite Jest, and opened it to page one. Her friends laughed—there was something humorous about the image, its sincerity and its hope—though, as her public defender husband, Alec Miran, mused a moment later, “How else do you start?” How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.” David Foster Wallace meant for the novel to pull readers in; he wanted, among other things, for people to like it. He said a few months after Infinite Jest came out that “a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work,” and that he feared that people would find his new book gratuitously difficult. What Wallace can’t have intended or predicted, prescient as he was, is that in the 2010s the novel would crest into a sort of synecdoche for youthful chauvinism, a signifier so potent that it would threaten to overtake the book itself. Readers now seem eager to leave behind its “litbro” baggage, an artifact of the Twitter and Bernie Bro era, and to engage with this complicated, pleasurable novel on its own terms. People, my reporting suggests, are ready to be normal about Infinite Jest. Read More
January 29, 2026 Arts & Culture On Broadway: Four Musicals and Me By Kevin Champoux All photographs courtesy of the author. One Easter Sunday, I attended a screening of the film Jesus Christ Superstar put on by my friend at the Brooklyn, New York, office of the well-respected literary magazine where she worked. There were about eight people there. All appeared to be treating the event as a substitute for church service: something they felt obliged to do. A French and comparative literature Ph.D. student made a point to tell me that he did not “get” musicals and was not expecting much from the film. He told me this, I think, because he knew I occasionally write theater reviews, attend Broadway musicals, and generally engage with the medium in a way that most people who pursue advanced degrees in French—and socialize at the offices of well-respected literary magazines on warm Sundays in April—do not. In the exchange that followed, I was able to ascertain that the real scourge for him was not movie musicals, which at least fit into a larger framework of film history, but the Broadway shows that are their frequent source material. It was a problem, he said, of overblown emotion. It was not relatable. I did not mount the exhaustive defense that he maybe thought I would. But I did ask him if he enjoyed going to the opera. “Of course,” he said. My own interest in the genre should not be overstated. Most Broadway musicals I have seen courtesy of comped tickets or evenings out with my parents. All those I’ve attended of my own volition have been written in some capacity by Stephen Sondheim, who is about as intellectually prudent a favorite as one can have while still being wearily unoriginal. Still, within my milieu, it doesn’t take much to be considered a “musicals person.” I wasn’t sure I was. But I found it odd that in a world where art and fashion and literature commingled with ease, musicals remained an object of scorn. Read More
October 10, 2025 Arts & Culture Slipping Away from Myself at the KPop Demon Hunters Sing-Along By Julian Castronovo Photograph courtesy of the author. I recall that the young man I was last month had forgotten who he was. Despite his general preoccupation with his own thoughts and feelings as well as his acute self-consciousness about being where he was, the young man had, at some point during the KPop Demon Hunters sing-along event, slipped away from himself. It was an easy thing to do. The theater, after all, was dark. And then there was all that light and sound. It was difficult to tell where it was coming from. Words and songs in English and Korean came from the screen, and they came from everyone around the young man, and they came from the young man himself. In the lovely confusion, the young man lost track of his identity. He was a movie character, and he was also a superfan evacuated of individuality by the sheer force of his love for the movie character of himself. When the lights came back on, the young man knew it was time to retrieve his identity, so he looked down at his outfit of identity markers. Oh duh. I was wearing my blue NewJeans shirt in a kind of deliberately unironic way, which, I reasoned insightfully, seemed to be an expression of my unique personal taste and highly sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious aesthetic intuition. And as the young man I then was, I recall thinking I must be, therefore, myself. I was happy about that, but also sad. Evidently a person can be two things at once. Read More
September 3, 2024 Arts & Culture The Black Madonna By Aaron Robertson Glanton Dowdell. Photograph from the Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, courtesy of Kristin Cleage. In 1959, at sixteen, Rose Percita Brooks had two choices: the navy or the nunnery. The way her grandmother Rosie beat her for kissing a boy on a couch in her home made the girl want to run into a convent. At least there she would be far from the old woman’s wrath. Whatever inspired Rosie’s cruel beatings may have been a holdover from an ancestor’s pain during slavery times, some ghost haunting the old woman. Rosie was not yet born when slavery existed in Memphis, but she would always moan joyfully in church, as though she had witnessed the first Juneteenth. It was clear when the spirit possessed her. She grunted more loudly than anyone else. Oh, that’s Grandma, Rose thought. She’s happy now. She’s got the Holy Spirit. It was Rose’s grandfather who told his wife that the girl was in the living room with a stranger. They had flirted from opposite ends of the sofa until Rose accepted the boy’s slow departing kiss. That same evening, Rosie surprised the girl when she was changing for bed. As she recoiled from her grandmother’s blows, Rose thought of herself as an abused housewife, so wholly bound to her captor that she started to feel indistinguishable from Rosie. Would she ever escape her grandmother’s orbit? Rose bathed the woman, laid out her church clothes, and had nearly the same damn name. “What are you doing with that man?” Rosie demanded. The worst thing the girl could do was lift her arms to protect her face. Rosie’s force increased each time the girl tried to shield herself from the blows. Read More