Before “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was a Grammy Hall of Fame record, the title of an Angela Bassett–fronted biopic, or a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, it was a breathy little ditty sung by the British pop group Bucks Fizz. After the ABBA-reminiscent band recorded its rendition, the songwriter Terry Britten took his track to a very different artist who initially disliked it, before she brought it to life with a new vigor.
Psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term-care facilities have served as chilling backdrops to some of film’s most arresting psychological thrillers. But the foreboding lighthouse of Shutter Island and the macabre, labyrinthine hospital of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest pale in comparison with both movies’ animating horrors: the wretched treatment of the people trapped within.
MICHELLE MISHINA KUNZ / New York Times / ReduxIf you’ve ever been lured into a mediocre dining establishment by the promise of unlimited food, you’re not alone. In 2017, TGI Fridays made endless appetizers a permanent part of its menu because they had, in the words of the chain’s CEO, become such a “pop-culture phenomenon, as evidenced by the outcry we heard every time the limited-time offer expired.
The Martin Luther King Jr. who is introduced to most American schoolchildren is a tragic hero—not just in a colloquial sense, but also in a mythological one. Greek tragedy is driven by characters just like the King described in textbooks. They’re brilliant and virtuous, yet doomed by a small error in judgment. King’s flaw, we are taught, was his idealism, which both made him a civil-rights hero and brought about his downfall.
Less than six months before a mob of the sitting president’s supporters would descend upon the United States Capitol, a more solemn crowd gathered at its steps. Among those who arrived to pay their final respects to the late Representative John Lewis were Washington, D.C., residents who appreciated his unwavering support of statehood for the district.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.Even when you love to cook, being responsible for feeding yourself—and others, especially children—is never a simple duty.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom begins with what seems at first like a harrowing journey. Netflix’s new adaptation of the late August Wilson’s play opens with a foreboding shot of the woods; the only noises are of crickets chirping, dogs barking, and young Black men gasping for air as they sprint through the trees. But then, we hear the music.
My biggest accomplishment of the year was a bloody mess. The project started simply enough, but within weeks, I found myself regularly staring at contorted limbs and gaping wounds. Soon few things marked the end of my workday more clearly than a grisly episode of Dexter, the mid-aughts Showtime series about a forensic analyst who moonlights as a serial killer.
Three years ago, the Washington Football Team hosted its first-ever Thanksgiving Day game. The franchise had played—and lost—on the holiday many times before. But the 2017 game wasn’t notable just because the team, then known as the Redskins, actually won. That afternoon, a small group of Native American activists gathered outside FedEx Field, the Maryland arena where Washington plays, to educate D.C.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.By now it’s a well-worn cliché to say that 2020 has been rough, and that the holiday season will be no different. Indeed, many Americans will likely (and should certainly) not be celebrating this Thanksgiving, that fraught annual feast, in the traditional manner.
Just hours after Joe Biden was declared president-elect of the United States, and as massive celebrations gripped cities around the country, Dave Chappelle took the Saturday Night Live stage to puncture the jubilant mood. He started his monologue with a story about his great-grandfather, who’d been born into slavery in South Carolina. “I thought about him all day today, because I wish I could see him now.
Is any capitalist endeavor more menacing than the control of nature itself? The conquest of occupied lands, the rerouting of rivers, the hoarding of purified air—the American elite has always maintained itself in part by manipulating the environment. The wealthy characters on The Undoing, a new HBO miniseries set in New York City that premiered Sunday, can’t harness the East River. They don’t set about planting flags in Central Park or claiming Fifth Avenue.
For a few merciful moments during last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, viewers were offered a rare distraction from the fact that the nation is barreling toward a chaotic election. When Issa Rae, the evening’s host, stepped onto the stage for her opening monologue, I breathed a sigh of relief—in no small part because that meant the “Dueling Town Halls” cold open was over.
Wide-eyed and brokenhearted, the greasy-haired Nevada teens of Panic! at the Disco channeled their woes into elaborate, vaudevillian theatrics. (Nigel Crane / Redfern)Before TikTok, SoundCloud, or even YouTube existed, four gawky teenagers from suburban Las Vegas found success by posting their music to an unlikely platform: the Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz’s LiveJournal page.
Before any of its characters appear on-screen, HBO’s Coastal Elites introduces itself with a genteel red font that bears a striking resemblance to The New Yorker’s proprietary typeface. Within minutes, viewers are introduced to Miriam (played by a characteristically engaging Bette Midler).
Though strippers are some of hip-hop’s most , starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu. But the series benefits from the spaciousness of television as a format: P-Valley combines the weightiness of a premium-cable show with the fun and soapiness you might expect from a BET marathon. We’ve come a long way from The Players Club. P-Valley’s characters live rich, full lives shaped by the region they inhabit. Mercedes in particular is almost impossibly enthralling.
The week before Drakeo the Ruler released his latest album, the rapper’s hometown of Los Angeles was swept up in protests, like many other cities around the country. Following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, these demonstrations brought new public scrutiny to the U.S. criminal-justice system’s racist practices.
Eli Joshua Ade / HBOLike many young people, the protagonist of the 2016 novel Lovecraft Country devours entertainment that his father finds foolish and reprehensible. Atticus loves reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror—genres that, as his dad points out, are dominated by white authors and full of racist stereotypes. The tension inherent in Atticus’s fondness for such writers drives much of Lovecraft Country, which is set in the 1950s.
In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote.
Last summer, I made a grievous mistake while getting my hair braided.
Some albums demand ascetic listening, the kind that happens best in solitude or while wearing noise-canceling headphones. Such music has its place, especially in the colder months. But summer is made for the populist records—albums ideally consumed secondhand, whether blaring from the bass-heavy stereos of cars parading down hot, crowded streets or wafting from the open windows of apartments down the block.
Saliva has had a strange few years.It seems like just yesterday that the phrase Spit in my mouth catapulted to memetic heights, after the 2018 wide release of Disobedience, a romance film about two Orthodox Jewish women that involves a meticulously choreographed and widely shared sex scene. Saliva had another big moment in 2019: During the first season of Netflix’s thoughtful British raunchfest Sex Education, a memorable encounter between two teenage boys only inspired more memes.
It was a sexual misfire that first broke me. I’d been coasting along, appreciating the low-stakes ebbs and flows of HBO’s Insecure, when suddenly the problem was right in my face.Well, rather, it was in Issa’s. Midway through Season 2 of the series, which follows a group of black Millennials meandering through adulthood in Los Angeles, Insecure’s protagonist was ready to shake things up.