A Remnick addition to the New Yorker’s masthead, pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones must have been the first person to sneak the phrase “inscrutable batphones” into the magazine (as in, “not all musicians below the age of 30 are getting tattooed with runic symbols and sending viruses to
Dear TMN, Today’s “Not an Open Letter” by Elizabeth Kiem speaks for so many of us who understand how the world works in shades of gray. I was sad and disappointed to learn about Grass’s secret when I first read about it. It was the same knee-jerk
Last night a pothole exploded on our street. Or so we think. No one I talked to on the block is positive about what happened. Here’s what we know: Around eleven last night, the lights in our apartment dimmed to brown and there was a massive explosion; our landlady,
I just spent two and a half weeks submerged in the woods and there wasn’t much music besides frogs and a neighbor’s chainsaw. Radio stations were few; the local NPR broadcast was locked in a fundraising drive; my iPod wouldn’t talk to the tape deck in the
Last weekend, my wife and I had two perfect New York days. We had friends over for dinner and stayed up late. We saw a very moving Douglas Gordon survey and ran around Manhattan. We visited with more friends, we had dinner in a restaurant, stayed up late and slept
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is dead at 52. I want to dig a hole, erect a church on top, play her “Handel Arias” on repeat, and eat shirred eggs. Her Handel Arias are their own cathedral. I never saw her sing in concert. Tomorrow I will disappear, track down Martha Argerich
My great-aunt Mary lives year-round on an island off the coast of Maine and still smokes while she watches the tennis or enjoys a nightcap. It’s given her an amazing speaking voice: her register’s permanently cracked from the cigarettes, with bass-y wobbles, but her Maine
Two nights ago, our buzzer rang at around 11 o’clock. We weren’t expecting anyone. On the stoop stood a tall guy with a backpack, staring through the front gate. I unlocked the interior door and asked him if I could be of any help. “Man, I’m hoping
How often, as you get older and no longer go to shows, can you swallow fantastic new bands and actually digest them? My friend and deep music head Chris has sworn off new bands altogether. I hear two a week and feel gassy. I’m not at the point, yet,
Dale Peck’s “judging” of McEwan’s and Smith’s novels shows that this self-proclaimed “most-hated man in publishing,” while lacking any critical acumen, possesses an unmatched ego. “Contemporary fiction’s nothing more than an enabler of certain bourgeois illusions” …”Social compact is spiritual and species suicide”…”literary
