There’s nothing quite like gazing at an Impressionist exhibit to the mellow sound of “Mommmm, can we go yet?” Any parent who has tried to instill love of art and culture into children knows it can be a challenge. Luckily, many New York City museums have special programs aimed for children.
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Seeing Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right—seeing her face register a spectrum of feeling as if it were the evening news—I was more than ever convinced that she is one of the greatest ever American film actors. And it’s all in that magnificent face, which is arguably the face of our Read More
It’s hard to know what future historians will say of New York City in the first half of the 21st century. But surely they will notice, and chronicle, the return of accountability in the city’s public schools. It has been less than a decade since the old Board of Education, a symbol of bureaucratic Read More
Congressman Charles Rangel spent years preparing for the legislative role of a lifetime, that of chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, as his seniority grew, political observers in New York watched closely as Mr. Rangel moved closer to his goal. The Republican Congressional Read More
Today in weird: Warren Redlich is so impressed with his website’s traffic that he has issued a public challenge to the other gubernatorial candidates to release their website traffic statistics through Google Analytics.
In a press release, Redlich positioned the challenge as an issue of transparency. Redlich asked: “What do they have to hide?’” according Read More
On a recent hot afternoon, five veterans of the city’s conspiracy and fringe political scenes gathered on the ratty couches of the Yippie Museum Café, at Bleecker and Bowery, to discuss a new political organization that shares all of the anti-establishment animus, if not quite the Aquarian exuberance, of the Yippies.
The founding members Read More
Last week, the new editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, told The Observer that he and his recently installed poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, were preparing a “holy shit” poetry section for their first issue at the helm, due out Sept. 15.
“Robyn and I have been arguing about poems since we met,” said Read More
Helen Frankenthaler was 23, only three years out of Bennington, when she developed her richly colored, radiant whirls and whorls of “stain” paintings. She’d seen Jackson Pollock’s “black-and-white” stain paintings, and adapted them, in 1952, to create her own idiom by greatly thinning out her paints and spreading them in broad swaths, curves Read More
I have two reactions to the latest Mel-gate. The first is that I couldn’t give a hoot about Mr. Gibson, a mega-celebrity who has clearly lost control of his life. The second is: There but for the grace of God go we.
I don’t mean that we all harbor barely suppressed racism, Read More
