newyorker.com
One recent afternoon, Wahabi took a walk in the neighborhood with Gillian Slovo, a novelist and playwright whose verbatim drama “Grenfell: in the words of survivors,” which premièred at the National Theatre in London last year, comes this month to St. Ann’s Warehouse. Wahabi is one of nine former residents of the tower whose words—which are drawn from interviews with Slovo and from the official inquiry into the disaster—have been woven together in what the Guardian called “a masterpiece of foren…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
Rafi is actually less intrusive than the animated animal featured in another posture-correction desktop app, Nekoze. This one employs a computer’s camera to determine whether the user is slouching or slumping. If she is, an icon of a cat’s face pops up on her menu bar, accompanied by a surprisingly realistic meow. It’s a peculiar choice for a posture admonition: surely a meow could make a user look down at her ankles for a creature that wants feeding or petting, rather than stiffen her spine, ey…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
That greeting—crude, undermining, and, frankly, creepy—is not in “Scoops,” a memoir by McAlister, on which the movie is based. Nonetheless, it has the ring of truth, establishing what both the Netflix drama and the real-life broadcast amply demonstrate: that a man schooled from childhood in the importance of protocol, and whose most critical words for Epstein during the interview will be that his former friend “conducted himself in a manner unbecoming,” has a reflexive impulse toward female obje…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
James tells the joke to Connie, a subject in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. Connie is a psychology student, and she knows that the antidepressant affects dopamine levels, but she can’t tell if it’s working—or if she’s taking a placebo. Locked inside a medical facility for weeks, she has few people to talk to except for the doctor and Tristan, another young volunteer. Connie and Tristan—placed in proximity within a charged, unfamiliar setting, and with a powerful drug possibly coursin…
2 months ago
newyorker.com
Reich, who is twenty-five, first performed the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in the summer of 2022. (It was unfortunate, he observed, that the covid-19 pandemic hadn’t occurred back in “the olden days, when people were used to disease and had the emotional toolbox to deal with it.”) The Fringe is a proving ground for any aspiring British comedy performer or writer. Stephen Fry, John Oliver, and Richard Ayoade all performed there as members of the Cambridge Footlights, the university’s f…
5 months ago
newyorker.com
Huppert, who is perhaps France’s most celebrated actor on the stage and the screen, had been based in Bordeaux for about seven weeks, shooting a movie with the director Patricia Mazuy. She and Mazuy first worked together almost a quarter of a century ago, on “Saint-Cyr,” a period drama in which Huppert plays Madame de Maintenon, the secret wife of King Louis XIV. She was nominated for a César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar—one of sixteen such nominations since her first, in 1976. (She…
5 months ago
newyorker.com
In the opening scene of the modern-dress, German-language production, Hüller stood alone onstage, her hands hanging uselessly by her sides, her eyes downcast. In a trembling near-whisper, she spoke lines that Shakespeare originally wrote for Hamlet’s friend Horatio: “If there be any good thing to be done, / That may to thee do ease and grace to me, / Speak to me.” Hüller smiled faintly to hold back tears, and her voice broke as she muttered, “You are here, you are here.”
When it came time for Ha…
6 months ago
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The movie dramatized the days—then still relatively fresh in the nation’s memory—during which the streets around Buckingham Palace became a zone of unprecedented public mourning. Floral tributes were piled densely against the palace’s gate, forming a moat of cellophane and decomposing petals. Men and women wept openly on the Mall. Meanwhile, the Queen and her immediate family stayed at a distance, at Balmoral, in Scotland, to which they had removed earlier in the summer for their traditional vac…
6 months ago
newyorker.com
How is marriage unlike everything else? And why is it sometimes so very awful? These are questions raised by the British critic and filmmaker Devorah Baum in her nimble new work, “On Marriage” (Yale). There is, she writes, “something enigmatic about the marital bond lying in excess of Enlightenment reason or easy description.” Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—w…
7 months ago
newyorker.com
Posh and Becks, as the tabloids called them—nice short words, great big headlines—were a celebrity match made in heaven. They were also a match made in David’s fantasies, it turns out, even before the couple’s first encounter. He tells the documentary’s director, Fisher Stevens, about seeing a Spice Girls video while he and Neville were idly watching TV one day. “I turned round to Gary, I went, ‘See that one there? I’m gonna marry that one,’ ” David remembers. (The documentary suggests—and foren…
7 months ago
newyorker.com
The 2009 play, currently in revival, finds new resonance in a post-Brexit reality and with Boris Johnson hanging on at 10 Downing Street.
almost 2 years ago
