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16Apr

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The Unseen Sides of Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman did not come by her artistic precocity by accident. Her father, George, was an abstract painter. Her mother, Betty, was a ceramicist. Both made clear to Francesca that art was worth situating at the center of life. During the summers, the family would retreat to a house in the Tuscan countryside and make trips to see the works of the Florentine masters. While her parents performed their own acts of artistic devotion, Francesca was allowed to roam the museums alone, and came back with sketchbooks full of women in elaborate gowns, copied from court paintings centuries old. Her older brother, Charles, had juvenile diabetes, which was comparatively dangerous and rare in the nineteen-sixties. “It created a kind of family dynamic where there was always attention and control on...

How Netanyahu’s Right-Wing Critics See Israel’s Future

20Dec

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How Netanyahu’s Right-Wing Critics See Israel’s Future

According to opinion polls, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, is losing popularity, and voters want him to leave office after the war in Gaza ends—if not sooner. Netanyahu has faced widespread criticism for allowing the October 7th attacks to occur, and some members of his own Likud Party have argued that he is not fighting the war—which, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures, has already killed nearly twenty thousand Palestinians in Gaza, forty per cent of whom were children—decisively enough. One of those members is Danny Danon, a Knesset member who has twice challenged Netanyahu for the Party’s leadership, and also served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2015 until 2020. Danon is also a fierce opponent of a Palestinian state. (In a 2011 Op-Ed ...

19Nov

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John Woo Returns to Hollywood

On December 1st, the Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo will release his first American movie in twenty years, a dialogue-free Christmas revenge drama called “Silent Night.” But his imprint on mainstream American cinema never went away. Woo’s approach to action filmmaking is detectable everywhere from Marvel movies to the “John Wick” franchise. At their best, Woo’s successors carry forward his style of visually spectacular action set pieces and bloody, balletic fight choreography. At their worst, they fetishize Woo-like action without Woo’s half cynical, half romantic style of melodrama.Woo (originally Wu Yu-seng) was born in 1946 in the mountainous Chinese region of Guangzhou. He grew up in the slums of New Kowloon, formerly Shek Kip Mei, after his father, a high-school teacher, moved their fa...

Israel’s Calamity—and After | The New Yorker

9Oct

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Israel’s Calamity—and After | The New Yorker

All weekend long, in countless commentaries in the media, in painful telephone calls with friends in Israel, came the march of analogies, the inevitable attempts to make sense of the incomprehensible. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the bloody storming of southern Israel that Hamas launched from the Gaza Strip was, many were saying, the most horrific national tragedy since the Yom Kippur War, in 1973. Others said it was Pearl Harbor. Or the “Israeli 9/11.”The audacity and brutality of the attack was as astonishing as its secrecy. Early on Saturday morning, Hamas fired more than two thousand missiles into Israel, and bulldozers and fighters easily breached the security fence near the Erez Crossing. In part because Israel had sent so many troops north, to the West Bank, to deal with unrest there—p...

6Oct

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The Man Painting America’s Wars

Since embracing Tyvek, Cvijanovic has painted vast and ambitious subject matter at a commensurate scale: a delirious tableau of a floating, discombobulated Los Angeles; a towering recreation of the Babylonian set for D. W. Griffith’s 1916 epic “Intolerance.” For the Bean Center, Cvijanovic set out to paint seventeen American battlefields, from the colonial era to the present, on nearly seven thousand square feet of Tyvek. This is a colossal task—laid end to end, the paintings are about as long as the Chrysler Building is tall—but Cvijanovic learned to paint fast during his years in the work-for-hire wilderness. He started his first mural in January, 2021, and finished the rest in just under two years. (Eight more are awaiting funding, which depends on congressional approval.) Although the...

30Sep

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The Quiet Revolution of the Sabbath

Here is a story I wasn’t sure my sister would ever let me tell. I come from a churchgoing family, but one Sunday my sister did not go to worship, even though the rest of us did. She wasn’t sick. In fact, she was the opposite of sick: recently confirmed, she had simply decided to exercise one of the rights she understood to be hers through confirmation, namely staying home for no reason other than that she wanted to do so. I must have found this shocking—not only her decision but the willingness of our parents to abide—though I can’t really summon a memory of how I felt before worship because of what happened after.Back then, the sanctuary of our little country church was divided from the fellowship hall by a single doorway. Pitched high on the left and low on the right, the door is uneven...

Tessa Hadley’s Longing to Put Life Into Words

4Sep

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Tessa Hadley’s Longing to Put Life Into Words

Tessa Hadley recently published her thirtieth short story in The New Yorker—the first, “Lost and Found,” came out in 2002—and also, earlier in the summer, put out her twelfth book of fiction in just over two decades, the story collection “After the Funeral.” In a sense, Hadley, who published her first novel at forty-six, seems to be making up for lost time—narratives pouring out of her, albeit in finely crafted sentences and immersive paragraphs. As she once told me, stories, for her, “begin with those two questions, which sound so banal but are, in fact, the richest and most mysterious ones: What happened? And: What happened next?” She’s a writer whose eye for the telling detail and whose understanding of human behavior—what she calls her “empathetic imagination”—give her stories a kind ...

2Sep

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Lagos, Glimpsed from Seven Vantages

Traffic can be a nuisance on the streets of any city. In Lagos, it organizes daily life—for schoolchildren, for office employees, and for the scores of informal workers who sell beverages and snacks to commuters who traverse the megacity in danfos, or public buses. “The energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—converge at the bus stops,” the novelist and photographer Teju Cole writes in his hybrid travelogue of Lagos, “Every Day Is for the Thief.”Look through the eyes of the photographer Logo Oluwamuyiwa, however, and a fleet of danfos morphs into a phalanx of intersecting geometric planes, transforming the everyday experience of traffic into a striking modernist composition. Citing inspiration from the American mid-century street photographers Garry Winogrand and Robert Fra...

What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

22Jul

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What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

“Waves Only Get Real When They Break,” by Colin Farish (piano), Jaron Lanier (guzheng), and Jhaffur Khan (flute). It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. She taught me the piano by holding her hands over mine, bending my fingers into arches above the keys. When I was just a boy, she died in a car accident. Afterward, I was both boundlessly angry and attached to the piano. I played it with extreme force, sometimes bleeding onto the keys. I still feel her hands when I play. I feel them even more when I’m learning a new instrument.As I write this, on a laptop in my kitchen, I can see at least a hundred instruments around me. There’s a Baroque guitar; some Colombian gaita flutes; a Fren...

9Jul

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The Lower East Side’s Folk Historian

A native of Alberta, Canada, Patterson comes from what he described to me recently as the “bad end of the working class.” He left home at the age of fifteen, and spent a decade and a half in various art schools as both a student and a teacher. When, in 1979, he came to the Lower East Side with his partner, the artist Elsa Rensaa, a decade of “benign neglect,” landlord-sponsored arson, and government seizures had left the immigrant enclave pocked with abandoned buildings and discarded needles. But New Yorkers abhor a vacuum, and squatters, artists, and outcasts quickly flocked to the area’s cheap real estate. Patterson began walking the streets with a Pentax 125 S.L.R. that Rensaa had gifted him, taking pictures of the sex workers, poets, schoolchildren, and punks who called the Lower East...