Sarah Larson

On First Avenue, know-it-alls were out in full effect, and clusters of strangers were invoking California. “On the top floor it felt like a big truck,” a woman announced. “But as if it could actually move the building?” “I was at my job on Sixteenth Street,” another woman said. “I’m from California. I was taught, especially in brick buildings, to go outside.” The group discussed building structures in the East and West Village. “All the tenement buildings, they’re all, like, done for, in any kin…

Walters, who rose to fame in 1985 with Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew (“La Di Da Di,” “The Show”) and became one of hip-hop’s most sampled artists, spent his adolescence in the Bronx, after moving there from southwest London. The royalty motif “came from an English upbringing,” he said. The monarchy, sure, but also “Walt Disney, Cinderella stories, the castle, the Snow Whites, love stories, the Sleeping Beauties, the prince comes with the slipper, Robin Hood, the jesters. It’s all the same…

The series takes its name from the Orwell quote “All art is propaganda . . . on the other hand, not all propaganda is art”—an idea, Walker tells us, perhaps best expressed by the 1956 film version of Orwell’s novel, which was “secretly made by the C.I.A.” (This is a truthful simplification.) We hear old newsreel audio describing the film’s glamorous London première, where there were evening gowns, tuxedos, and people dressed as Thought Police. The novel, we recall, is about a totalitarian future…

All week, the scene outside the courthouse had reflected the uneasy surreality of the scene inside it. Robert De Niro showed up to stump for Biden, and then an artist showed up to display a painting of Trump knocking De Niro out, “Raging Bull” style. One day, I’d sat on a park bench next to a pile of mysteriously abandoned notebooks, one open to a handwritten list that read “10 Things to Keep Stocked in Case the Bottom Falls Out in NYC.” Some items involved apps and chargers; two were “A small s…

“I looked at him and said, ‘What are you doing? Are you going golfing? You look like a leprechaun,’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I just need more softness in my life.’ ” Two days later, while awake, she told Pitt about the dream. “And he said, ‘That’s strange, because on Tuesday I told my stylist, “I need more green cashmere in my life. I need more softness.” ’ ” Sat Hari knew that this was important, and she had a green cashmere shirt made for him. It was a hit, and they started God’s Tru…

Glass, the son of an accountant father and psychologist mother, grew up in Baltimore with his two sisters. As a kid, he liked to go to the theatre with his family, loved comedy, put on shows in the basement; in high school, he performed in musicals and dabbled in magic. He started college at Northwestern, and worked at NPR in the summers. He eventually graduated from Brown, where he studied semiotics, then returned to NPR, where he spent the next seventeen years cutting tape and reporting and pr…

How Ruben Bolling, of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” finds the humor in a volatile news cycle.

On the trail, Emhoff has made loving music, and his wife, look like a campaign in itself. “If he’s a Cure fan, I’m gonna die,” one rallygoer said.

At his new flagship store in SoHo, the British billionaire and vacuum magnate celebrates futuristic headphones and mushroom-enhanced hair-styling products.

The podcast “Noble,” about severe malpractice at a Georgia crematorium, shows that even the most shocking of horror stories can be sensitively told.