Ariel Levy

From Doyle, this is apostasy. She has a sticky note on her bathroom mirror that reads “Feel It All.” In her most recent memoir, “Untamed,” she writes, “Every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don’t avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become.” During a Goop video chat in the early days of quarantine, Doyle advised Gwyneth Paltrow, “All feelings are for feeling.” Doyle, who is forty-four, has always espoused experiencing vividly all that is beautiful and brut…

“I found that really gratifying,” Shriver said, as she considered her prescience, one recent afternoon in London. Since the lockdown went into effect, she has been sequestered with her husband, Jeff Williams, at their row house in Bermondsey. It is a modest, comfortable place, decorated with thrift-store finds and small ceramic sculptures—smooth, faceless figures—that Shriver made, along with memorabilia that Williams has gathered in his decades as a jazz drummer. But Shriver was not feeling coz…

A collection of articles about 06 from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth reporting, commentary, and analysis.

Though the details of Moshfegh’s books vary wildly, her work always seems to originate from a place that is not quite earth, where people breathe some other kind of air. Her novella “McGlue” is narrated by a drunken nineteenth-century sailor, with a cracked head, who isn’t sure if he has murdered a man he loves. “Eileen” is the story of a glum prison secretary, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, who is disgusted by her gin-sodden father and by her own sexuality (the “small, hard mounds” of her breasts…

There was a small orchard on the property, and Dahl taught Ophelia to drive there when she was only eleven years old. Like Dahl’s child hero in “Danny, the Champion of the World”—who lived with his widowed father in a Gypsy caravan, and started driving when he was nine—Ophelia was a brave and competent child, who soon took to driving around the village. “I often chose my friends for their moms, these warm, interesting moms, and I would drive over to these people’s houses, and, even if my friend…

Although no one suspected it, there was a connection between these two occurrences. The postman, Ugo Celletti, had been helping to create the monsters—tremendous sculptures growing on the grounds of a local estate. He’d discovered a passion for mosaic work, and as he applied slivers of mirrored glass to the monsters he sometimes forgot about his postal route. Like many other people in the area, Celletti had his life altered by the mother of the monsters, who came to Italy to build a sculpture ga…

At the back of the classroom, Syd, played by Carrie Brownstein, turns to her friend Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman) and asks, “Have you ever been raped by an exclamation point?” “Actually, once I was gang-raped: question mark, exclamation point, and semicolon,” Ali replies. “That’s brutal,” Syd says stonily. “It’s very underreported.” In person, Jill Soloway looks nothing like a dowdy professor. She looks more like a wide-eyed cartoon doe. Her resting facial expression is curious, attentive, inten…

“He’s opening up the old Ptolemaic sphere,” the German man said, gazing at Jupiter. “Yes, I think so.” The Principessa, a very trim, pretty woman with platinum-blond hair and the sharp, perfectly symmetrical features of a Madame Alexander doll, is sixty-one, but she looks about forty-five, and she was wearing a short, tight black dress with white polka dots and shiny leather pumps. “But it’s like Marshall McLuhan—hot media,” she continued. “You interact with it and you decide what you want to se…

One day in late September, twenty teen-age athletes gathered for practice on a dirt road in front of Rametlwana Lower Primary School, after walking half an hour through yellow cornfields from their homes, to meet their coach, Jeremiah Mokaba. The school’s track is not graded, and donkeys and goats kept walking across it to graze on the new grass that was sprouting as the South African winter gave way to spring. “During the rainy season, we can’t train,” said Mokaba, a short man wearing a brown c…

One afternoon this winter, Alber Elbaz, the designer of the Paris fashion house Lanvin, was bounding around the second floor of Barneys on Madison Avenue, where dozens of women of means had come for the chance to meet him and place orders for his spring collection. A blonde in her early twenties was posing in front of a three-way mirror in glittering Lanvin pumps and a candy-pink strapless cocktail dress with clear plastic paillettes adorning the bodice; she was contemplating the frock for her e…