February 10, 2026 On Film At the Movies with John Ashbery By John Yau Eddie Valiant and Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). One of the things I learned from John Ashbery was to be myself, especially when it came to movies, the subject we talked about most, with poetry a distant second. He showed me that I could be a fanboy because I was one. He made it clear that I did not need to be embarrassed about my enthusiasms, which ran the gamut, from the campy science fiction and badly made horror films of Ed Wood to the low-angled, stationary camera of Yasujiro Ozu and Hong Kong noir films starring Chow Yun-fat. Though John was a shy man, and kept a lot to himself, he was not afraid to be silly, serious, and emotional about an artificial world that was to him more real than the world we lived in. John and I talked about movies, directors, actors and actresses, cameramen, everything having to do with film. He once sent me a VHS of Wood’s Orgy of the Dead (1965), starring strippers in a graveyard at night, and guaranteed it was in “pristine condition.” Another time, knowing I was interested in “yellowface” and all the non-Asian actors and actresses who played Asians in films, he gave me a book on the subject that had been sent to him by an academic press. When I was doing research on the silent film actress Anna May Wong, I met a man at a movie-memorabilia fair who published a monthly newsletter about minor Hollywood stars from the silent era. The inexpensively produced stapled publication consisted of short articles summarizing the subject’s career, where they were at the present moment (often in an assisted living facility), and their filmography. John was very happy that I got him a two-year subscription, which he later renewed, and quipped: “Do you think he will ever run out of material?” John couldn’t get too much of films. He was endlessly fascinated by those who lived in what his friend, Frank O’Hara, in his poem, “Ave Maria,” called “that glamorous country.” This essay is about the adventures that John and I had while watching and talking about movies and TV shows, and the different rabbit holes that I discovered and I scurried down. Read More
February 9, 2026 On Games Jeopardy!: A Partial Taxonomy By Adrienne Raphel Screenshot from “Jeffpardy!” clip. Everyone I know is now on Jeopardy! As someone who writes about crossword puzzles, constructs puzzles, and teaches courses on writing and games, I have found that my connection to trivia champions is an occupational hazard, since puzzles and Jeopardy! share an enthusiastic audience (including the most recent Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner, Paolo Pasco, who also currently holds the trophy for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament). It’s also in my genes: my brother was a Jeopardy! champion in 2017; my mom was on the show last summer. Read More
February 6, 2026 The Review’s Review The Garden of Earthly Delights By Rosa Shipley Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, ca. 1480–1490. Photograph by Anonymous, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage Photolibrary. Public domain. The Garden of Earthly Delights taught me the consequences of looking at something for too long. It was pitch-black in the auditorium where we had art history class, save for my professor’s beacon of pointer light and the vivid glow of the piece on the giant smartboard. We started by looking at the middle panel, then the left panel, then the right one, and, finally, the exterior of the piece—bewildering. An almost sci-fi design on what looked to be a wooden cabinet, which contained the sprawl of the three panels. Why, I still wonder, did we start with the middle? Read More
February 5, 2026 Fiction from “Blue Obstacles” By Kathleen Collins Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins. The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel manuscript by Kathleen Collins (1942–1988). You can read Alix Beeston’s introduction to the work on the Daily here. This room: contains all the dampness in the world. The sheets are dirty. The floor is cold. Rain runs down the gutters. A step away the door opens and a light clicks. Someone climbs the stairs. The light goes out, leaving them in darkness. I’m in a romantic French hovel. A taxi brought me here in the middle of the night. You carried in my luggage, smoking your pipe and grunting while I kissed you and inhaled the damp odor about you of tobacco and mildew. It was a thrilling moment. I have just arrived in my light blue knit fringed in green, looking like a brown nun. A rough net of black hair controls my face and my eyes focus poorly on things … now on your pointed shoes … now on the unmade bed … now on the dampness, the clutter of your romantic French hovel. Everything is coming to me fresh through your tinted glasses, your severely pointed shoes. You talk about Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, the New York School of poets. I’ve never heard of Andy Warhol, nor Frank O’Hara. It is coming to me fresh, while I settle inside the full pout of your lips and inhale the dampness. You have … an odor about you … an odor about you … all these years I have followed in the wake of an odor about you … Read More
February 5, 2026 Unfinished On Kathleen Collins’s “Blue Obstacles” By Alix Beeston Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins. It is a stitched composition notebook in a classic style: speckled, with a black-and-white cover. Burnished by time, it’s also patterned by a network of surface fissures, corrugated marks, and mottled shapes yellowing to gold. At some point the notebook appears to have been bent back on itself—crushed, perhaps, in the bottom of a bag or a drawer. I can only make out some of the words written on the front in blue ballpoint: “NOVEL,” confident in capitals, and what I’m pretty sure is the year “1974.” The notebook belongs to Kathleen Collins, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose body of creative work was mostly unpublished and unproduced prior to her death from cancer, at forty-six years of age, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed 2015 theatrical release of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing Ground, Collins’s work has found the broad public audience it didn’t during her lifetime. Her posthumous acclaim has been secured largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, as a nineteen-year-old in 1988, gathered her mother’s papers from her house and stashed them in a large trunk. They stayed there for many years until she felt ready to sort through them. When she did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother composed sharply observed fictions of Black middle-class life. Those manuscripts now form the spine of Collins’s official archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; they’re also the basis of the two published volumes of Collins’s writing that Nina edited, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019). Read More
February 4, 2026 First Person The Coke Factory By Turner Brooks Drawing by Turner Brooks. I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis. The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins. Read More