I’ve finally caught up with Hulu’s spectacular The Handmaid’s Tale, just in time for its unsettling second season. What seemed far-fetched in 1985, when Margaret Atwood’s knife-keen, dystopian novel first appeared, has now become all too feasible, what with Trump’s rise and the Right’s increasingly brazen tangos with fundamentalism and white supremacy. It’s easy to […]

Read more

Jacob Brackman was a 21-year-old features editor on The Harvard Crimson when, in 1965, he wrote this vivid profile of Izzy Stone, the ingenious and curmudgeonly proprietor of I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Corporate media was ascendant even in those early years, and Stone’s independence, fearlessness, and legendary work ethic earned him a unique standing at a […]

Read more

The Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s rule-defying female leads and leitmotifs (defiance, forbidden love, and obstructed mourning) are so consistent that his last three films, Gloria, A Fantastic Woman—awarded this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film—and Disobedience, could count as a trilogy on a woman’s quest for respect, ardor, and erotic freedom. His spirited, front-and-center heroines […]

Read more

On May 19, 2018, more than 50 million Americans and Britons turned on their televisions to watch Meghan Markle, a freckled, brunette American previously best known for co-starring in the basic-cable legal drama Suits, marry Henry Charles Albert David No-Last-Name, also known as the Duke of Sussex, an equally freckled, very ginger English veteran who […]

Read more

Nobody writes better about the obsessive nature of desire, about head-over-heels infatuation, than Egyptian expat André Aciman. I savored his latest book, Enigma Variations—about a bisexual man’s history of amorous escapades—happily absorbed through a mid-March blizzard. It seemed against the odds that a movie could do justice to Aciman’s gorgeous, neo-Proustian prose, but director Luca […]

Read more