Tag: 20th century
The Risks of a Cold War With China
A new cold War has come to seem all but inevitable. Tensions between China and the United States are mounting in step with Beijing’s growing power and ambition. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has poisoned its relations with the West and pushed Moscow and Beijing closer together, pitting a democratic bloc anchored by the United States against an autocratic one anchored by China and Russia. Much as it did in the 20th century, Washington is teaming up with allies in Europe
Why Don’t Grocery Stores Stock the Most American Fruit?
By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. “You have to get here early,” Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market’s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan’s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery
Why It’s So Hard to Get a Restaurant Reservation Right Now
In Mexico City, there is an airy, sun-filled restaurant called Contramar that offers a whole grilled snapper, flayed and then smeared with red chilis on one side, and green herbs on the other. The fish arrives on a minimalist wooden plate, surrounded by a series of small accouterments—sliced limes; tortillas; silky-smooth black beans; a shallow bowl of creamy, verdant sauce that looks like it was probably made with avocado.
I have to speculate on ingredients here because although I’ve seen
Fashion Has Abandoned Human Taste
As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls. Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a lengthy profile in The
America Is Running Out of New Ideas
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Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?
Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4,