When Ann Manov was an undergraduate humanities student at the University of Florida at the beginning of the 2010s, Florida ...

From “Save Penn Station,” which was published in Issue 31 of the New York Review of Architecture. “Hellhole” was the word that New York governor Kathy Hochul used for the existing Pennsylvania Station ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

May I be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities? The novel’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is driving over the Triborough Bridge in New York ...

Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin. The doctrine lost all legitimacy through its dependence on ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that, by means of labor, the wall must somehow become ...

“It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily ...

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a ...

Though I have been hearing (or rather reading) it a lot lately in many venues, it was a little odd — even a bit unsettling — to read it in the New York Times: My favorite part of writing is taking ...

During her time working as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981, Calle took photographs of the rooms she was assigned to clean. The Hotel, which includes her observations alongside the ...

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, by Hilary Spurling. Knopf. 480 pages. $35. There are about four hundred named characters in A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-novel sequence that ...