The first person to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created by President Richard Nixon, in late 1970, was an up-and-coming Republican politician named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus, known to his friends as Ruck, came from Indiana, where, during a single term in the state’s House of Representatives, he had managed to get elected majority … Read more
In “Magazine Dreams,” Jonathan Majors plays a volatile bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, presumably because the writer and director Elijah Bynum thought calling the character Murderguy Sulkface was too on the nose. This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress. Why is Killian so upset? … Read more
One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist—since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock—but she’s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside … Read more
“God expects me to stand up fearless for what I believe, to speak up against what I think is wrong, but not to worry, either in small personal matters or in world affairs, for fear,” Ruth once wrote. Bonner abides by Ruth’s rule for living. In “The Hand in the Glove,” Bonner solves the murder … Read more
Meeting him at the Prado made good sense, though. Anderson is a serious collector of ceramics and paintings, and he is also a patron of the arts: he inaugurated the now annual Loewe Craft Prize and is on the board of the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. I welcomed the opportunity to see the … Read more
Last Saturday evening, a recent Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil was greeted in the lobby of his apartment building, in Morningside Heights, by four plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security. They said that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being arrested, with a plan to deport him. … Read more
Debuting a new magazine in an age where print media is collapsing, especially among Latinos, seems a little like stretching out on a lawn chair on the deck of the Titanic as it’s going down. So imagine my surprise when I spotted one newly sprung to life last month while grabbing breakfast at a Mexican … Read more
“Jessie’s Girl” rocker Rick Springfield says he lives with the lasting toll of a gnarly fall that happened decades ago. The Grammy-winning musician, 75, said a recent full-body MRI scan revealed he has brain damage connected to an onstage tumble he took during a Las Vegas concert in 2000. The “Don’t Talk to Strangers” and … Read more
To visitors, Sweden is as remarkable for what is absent as for what is present. Walking around Stockholm, you hear little noise from traffic, because Swedes have so aggressively adopted electric vehicles. (They also seem constitutionally averse to honking.) Streets and sidewalks are exceptionally free from debris, in part because of the country’s robust anti-littering … Read more
In fiction, 2024 was the year of ditching the domestic. (And, if you happened upon a memoir, there was a good chance it was about someone getting divorced.) Look at the feverish reception of Miranda July’s road-trip novel “All Fours.” The main character, a married artist in her mid-forties, sets out from her Los Angeles … Read more
