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Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews

In this week’s issue, I write about Pauline Kael, who was a New Yorker film critic from 1968 to 1991, and whose reviewing helped establish several movies of the late sixties and seventies as classics....

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What She Said

In the fall of 1965, a season that brought movies as distinct as “Alphaville” and “Thunderball” to the screen, Pauline Kael came to dinner at Sidney Lumet’s apartment, in New York. Lumet was then a...

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The Disconnect

As reliably as autumn brings Orion to the night sky, spring each year sends a curious constellation to the multiplex: a minor cluster of romantic comedies and the couples who traipse through them,...

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Five Key TED Talks

In 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New England pastor who’d recently given up the ministry, delivered his first public lecture in America. The talk was held in Boston, and its nebulous-sounding subject...

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Listen And Learn

I’d like to begin with a story. On a bright late-February afternoon, in Long Beach, California, Lior Zoref, an Israeli Ph.D. student, climbed onstage to rehearse what he called “the talk of my life.”...

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Little Strangers

For Megan and Michael, a Los Angeles couple, the crucial turn of parenthood came not in the delivery room but eight months later, when they started to worry that something had gone wrong with their...

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Semi-Charmed Life

Once, many moons ago, I spent a month in Iceland with too little money and nothing to slow a march of days that seemed already to be getting much too short. It was September, and each morning and late...

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Hello Laptop, My Old Friend

In a recent issue of the magazine, I wrote about people in their twenties and some books that focus on their plight. The piece begins with an account of some weeks I spent in Iceland, in my own early...

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Just Saying

A Forty-second Street rehearsal studio. Card tables line one wall; the playwright and the director are seated at one of them, talking quietly. An actor enters.See the rest of the story at...

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Laptop U

Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At...

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Bay Watched

The way to meet up with Johnny Hwin, one of the best-connected kids in San Francisco, is to stand at the garage door of a small repair shop in the iffy section of the Mission District and dial his cell...

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Naked Launch

One Tuesday in January, 2007, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, sat backstage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and prepared for the most audacious bluff of his career. The iPhone was about to be...

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Postscript: Peter Kaplan

Peter W. Kaplan, the longtime editor of the New York Observer whose death, of cancer, was announced late yesterday, was wary of change but dazzled by modernity, adored by employees yet mysterious to...

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Hunger Artist

The history of California is a history of will grafted onto the landscape. First came missionaries, building churches out of clay and meting out God’s kingdom to the native peoples. Then came gold and...

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Moment To Moment

To get to the place where Richard Linklater was shooting his new film, you had to travel a short distance that seemed far: past the Barton Creek Greenbelt, a preserve on the edge of downtown Austin;...

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California Screaming

In the spiritual geography of San Francisco, Davies Symphony Hall—a glass-and-concrete half rotunda much resembling R2-D2’s neckline—sits between hills steep with layered mansions and the urban basin...

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Poison Ivy

I went to college early in this century, when the drug of choice on campus was sleep deprivation. Students trying to do more than the day allowed would run their work into the night and brave the...

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Save Footnotes

Some morsels of print culture—personals, short-form obituaries, movie credits, coupon expirations, terms of use—rush by us, unread and unloved, until suddenly, for one reason or another, we care....

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Slow TV Is Here

“I was in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker,” John Giorno, a poet and the star of Andy Warhol’s 1964 film “Sleep,” once told a British newspaper. “The stock market opened at 10 and closed at...

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What’s Yours Was Mine: An Airbnb Review

This is a review of the one-bedroom Airbnb rental at Greifenhagener Straße 227, in Berlin, where I have spent three blissful days. I never met Elfriede, my host, but she was responsive over e-mail,...

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Steven Pinker’s Bad Grammar

In a prologue to “The Sense of Style,” subtitled “A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” the brain scientist Steven Pinker explains that he’s been reading style manuals of late, and...

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Learning How to Talk Like Nichols and May

At the house where my grandparents have lived for more than sixty years, in Marin County, looking down onto the marshes of San Francisco Bay, there is a storage closet filled with vases, Duraflame...

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We Can Handle the Truth

Of the many loud and shouty movie scenes to air our nation’s moral laundry, possibly the loudest and the shoutiest comes in “A Few Good Men,” when Jack Nicholson, playing the wolf-eyed Colonel Jessup,...

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Barbara Boxer’s California

It has recently been cold in California—not as cold as in New York, but a cold that makes lingering outside unpleasant. Weather anchors spoke about “these temperatures” and “a chill right down”; a...

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Northern Lights

Some say that the American Dream is not what it once was: wages are low, retirement is not a parachute glide but a plunge, and those chosen to fix such problems labor at undoing one another’s laws. For...

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Rooting for “Boyhood”

Late in the summer of 2013, I landed in Austin, Texas, to spend a few days on the set of what had been described to me as Richard Linklater’s next project. On my first morning in town, I showed up for...

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Ethan Hawke’s Life-Changing Music Lesson

Everyone feels like a poet in the summer twilight, but settling into a poet’s life is something else. The path from inspiration to vocation, from that artsy late-night feeling to a full creative...

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Amos Yee: YouTube Star, Teen-Ager, Dissident

The most winsome political dissident you’ve never heard of, Amos Yee, is a Singaporean, a YouTube personality, and an activist who takes his cause more seriously than he takes himself. He has hair like...

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Google’s Monastic Vision for the Future of Work

Google may dream in the manner of a Californian, but it has mostly lived like a New Yorker. For years, the tech giant’s Mountain View headquarters sat on leased property, the corporate equivalent of a...

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The Age of Creepiness

Once upon a time, or so we’re told, the princes were charming, the villains were grotesque, and distinguishing between them was as simple as examining their manners and their minds. When Rapunzel meets...

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Feeling the Bern With the Youth Vote

The oddest thing about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking Democratic nomination for President, is not his distaste for fund-raising, his insistence that he is a “democratic...

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High Score

Awful days, like childhood summers, flow together in a vague, compounding blur. Could your bad luck have begun on Monday, when a jumbo bottle of shampoo fell on your foot? Or were you fine until...

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All Hail the Achievement Beard!

A photograph of the retired David Letterman has been making the rounds recently; perhaps you’ve seen it. The photo shows the former late-night host stalking the street in khakis and a floppy...

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Blood Ties

The door was locked but the light outside was burning bright, and when the three women arrived for bridge with Mr. Haysom they were puzzled to find no one answering the bell. The cars were in the...

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The “Founder” Generation’s Creation Myth

Late last week, MTV, the semi-official guardian of our nation’s youth culture, published the results of what it called “a nationwide survey reaching over 1,000 teens.” Given that many public high...

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Will Jens Soering Get to Go home?

Last month, I published a piece in the magazine, “Blood Ties,” about one of the strangest murder stories I’ve ever encountered. The crime, committed in the spring of 1985, entailed the brutal slaughter...

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Air Head

I fly an average of twice a month these days, usually for work, and although I spent much of my life afraid of airplanes, I now chase them with an addict’s need. If it has been a while since I have...

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The Fortifying Pleasures of YouTube Cockpit Videos

Anxiety can be a talisman for an unknown fate. On Twitter, I follow something called Food Poisoning Bulletin, which keeps me up to date on every case of befouled meat or E. coli infection in the fifty...

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Says You

In the spring of 1946, George Orwell, writing in the London Tribune, opened with a view from underneath the rock:See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:The “Star Wars” Critics Have...

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An Epic Takedown of Élite Brospeak

Serial eavesdroppers may have noticed something alarming recently—more alarming than usual, anyway—in the public uses of a common adjective: “epic.” The word has started rearing its head in odd places....

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Welcome to the Future: Middle-Class Housing Projects

I spent the nineties growing up in San Francisco, which, like many cities in that decade, churned with swirls of startling change. Boulevards were beautified (although a shaggy indie scene managed to...

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The Big Uneasy

At Oberlin, it started in December, when the temperatures ran high, although the weeping willows and the yellow poplars that had flared in the fall were bare already. Problems had a tendency to...

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LinkedIn and the Modern Worker’s Wandering Eye

Microsoft announced plans to purchase LinkedIn for $26.2 billion on Monday—its biggest acquisition ever—so, with renewed curiosity, I logged onto the network for the first time in some weeks. On the...

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The Multitasking Celebrity Takes Center Stage

The leading cover line on the July issue of GQ—“Kim as You’ve Never Seen Her”—seems, at first, to promise the impossible, because as far as Kim Kardashian goes there is almost nothing that the world...

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