Dubbed the Gentle Despot of The New Yorker, William Shawn was the shy, strong-willed, nurturing and eccentric steward of America’s leading magazine and mentor to generations of the country’s most gifted writers. In this short account of his own time in Shawn’s orbit, written in January, 1993, the critic Jacob Brackman depicts Shawn’s unconditional support […]

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When Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine, a country headliner who’s “faded as his jeans,” and Lady Gaga’s working-class Ally (a fed-up waitress and fledgling singer-songwriter who moonlights in a drag bar) suddenly ignite in concert for the first time, the newly created song they perform, “Shallow,” is so lucid and expressive (the alcoholic Jackson sings, poignantly, […]

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Rather than offering standard gore and merely giving us the willies, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Ryan Murphy’s second installment of American Crime Story on the FX channel (now available on Amazon Prime Video and ITunes), is one of the rare serial killer dramas genuinely interested in sexual mores, complex character, spiky history, and salient […]

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Strip by Jules Feiffer. The Ghost Script, Jules’s new graphic novel, is just out. This piece originally ran in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and was reprinted with permission in the November issue of The Spectator.

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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 […]

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