Tag: inverted
Class Consciousness for Billionaires | The New Yorker
Around the start of the twenty-first century, the Oxford sociologist Jonathan Gershuny noticed a change in the way the privileged behaved: the leisure class that the economist Thorstein Veblen had described during the Gilded Age seemed no longer to exist. The farther up people were on the income ladder, the harder they worked. “Busyness,” Gershuny concluded, was “the badge of honor for the new superordinate working class.” These days, even the highest-profile billionaires tend to be a little grim-faced. Mark
“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz,” Reviewed
Delmore Schwartz died in the early morning of July 11, 1966, in an ambulance on the way to Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been living alone in a seedy hotel near Times Square, reading compulsively and scribbling in the many notebooks that he kept during his last, itinerant years. At fifty-two, he was no longer the precocious young writer and critic—“blazing with insight, warm with gossip,” as his friend John Berryman described him—who had charmed poetry’s old masters and young upstarts alike.
Battling Under a Canopy of Russian and Ukrainian Drones
Members of Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion describe themselves as firemen. Their job is to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse. Lately, their service has been in high demand: the front is burning. A large-scale counter-offensive last year failed to achieve meaningful victories, and since then Russia has been on the attack. One of its priorities appears to be Kupyansk, a city in northeastern Ukraine, some twenty miles from the Russian border. According
Park Chan-wook Gets the Picture He Wants
Last spring, I was in a white van rumbling down a road about fifty miles east of Bangkok, passing dusty awnings that hung over shops hawking cell phones and sneakers, when, abruptly, the vehicle stopped. The road was barricaded; the barricades were manned by soldiers in uniform. After a moment, I realized that the soldiers were actors and the barricades were props. We had reached the set of “The Sympathizer,” the director Park Chan-wook’s seven-episode HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer
The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth Goes On
If Abraham Lincoln had leaned back in his rocking chair that night at Ford’s Theatre and turned around—hearing a footfall or a rustle, or glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a stage light glinting off the mouth of the derringer—he would have recognized his murderer. Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,” he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman
Forty-Three Mexican Students Went Missing. What Really Happened to Them?
Investigators pulled this account together slowly in the course of years, cross-checking hundreds of interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, and participants in the events. But the answer to a key question sought by the students’ parents—what happened to their children after they were last seen that night long ago?—remains elusive: of those seven or eight missing hours, only fragments can be pieced together and the story behind them guessed at. Various documents, including text messages and testimony in the court filing,
The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden, by Calvin Tomkins
The art world is a different place today. Top commercial galleries compete to represent emerging artists of color; auction prices for Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Simone Leigh, Henry Taylor, and other Black art stars are in the millions; and “Black Male” is a subject of graduate dissertations. Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recently called it “one of the most important exhibitions in American history.”
Thelma Golden grew up in the heart of
The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 A.M. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that
Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is
When America First Dropped Acid
One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. “I wish I could talk in Technicolor,” she said. And, at another point, “I can see the molecules. I .