George Eliot’s Ugly Beauty
If George Eliot’s Wikipedia entry has received an unusually high number of views this week, the responsibility lies with Lena Dunham, who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Victorian novelist’s page...
View ArticleIf the Shoe Fits
Tamara Mellon, the co-founder of Jimmy Choo, has written a memoir called “In My Shoes,” and a party was held in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons the other week to celebrate its publication. The book...
View ArticleThe Dream Palace
A few weeks ago, the Chelsea Hotel acquired a new owner: Ed Scheetz, the C.E.O. of King & Grove, a luxury-hotel company. The other day, Scheetz took a tour of the hotel, which closed to guests two...
View ArticleJust Add Sugar
In 1996, Hamdi Ulukaya, a twenty-five-year-old student from Turkey, was attending language school in Troy, New York. He had left home for America two years earlier. One day, his father called and...
View ArticleBook-Club Guide To a Remaindered Book
1. When the author’s agent initially asked the author who he thought the readers of his proposed book would be and he defensively replied, “Everyone,” do you think the author should have immediately...
View ArticleFor the Birds
Avenues, a private school that opened last year in Chelsea, intends to turn out young people who will be “architects of lives that transcend the ordinary,” according to its mission statement. Graduates...
View ArticleWritten Off
Early one morning in November, five hundred clinicians gathered at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott for the twenty-third annual Renfrew Center Foundation conference, devoted to the understanding and...
View ArticleOpen Wide
Dressed in black, and carrying a frayed silver Kevlar-and-canvas shoulder bag, Anthony Roth Costanzo made his entrance at P.S. 37, in the Bronx, early one Monday morning just as first period was...
View ArticleBack of the Envelope
Jen Bervin, a visual artist and a poet, first read Emily Dickinson as most people who read Emily Dickinson do, in a poetry collection aimed at high-school students. It was not until Bervin was getting...
View ArticleThe Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents
Anna Allanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, a public elementary school in Carroll Gardens, has long considered the period of standardized testing that arrives every spring to be a...
View ArticleGeorge Eliot’s Superfan
This excerpt is drawn from the book “My Life in Middlemarch,” which comes out tomorrow. In the summer of 1871, while working on “Middlemarch,” George Eliot received a short letter from a young Scotsman...
View ArticleStarman
It was a mild October day in Hollywood, but a trace of artificial snow remained on the ground as Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History,...
View ArticleLost Illusions at the Local Bookstore
Martin Amis, in his 1995 novel, “The Information,” delivered a memorable riff on the reading habits of transatlantic airplane travellers as divided by class. “In Coach the laptop literature was...
View ArticleLears
If you’re a British person of a certain age, you know Michael Pennington as a distinguished classical actor, belonging to the same generation as Sir Ian McKellen but lacking his blockbuster...
View ArticleLouis C.K. Against the Common Core
On Thursday morning, thousands of children who attend public school in New York City will be sitting down for the second of three days of standardized math tests. Among them will be the offspring of...
View ArticleIce-Cream Defense
Karol Ruiz, a third-year, part-time student at the Seton Hall University School of Law, considered removing the tiny stud adorning her left nostril before participating in the finals of the school’s...
View ArticleGeorge Eliot and the Secret of Motherhood
If writing about the life of another begins with the desire to answer a set of questions, it can end with discovering new questions that are harder, perhaps impossible, to answer. Now that I have spent...
View ArticleLiterature And Life
Unless you spend much time sitting in a college classroom or browsing through certain precincts of the Internet, it’s possible that you had not heard of trigger warnings until a few weeks ago, when...
View ArticleMakerocracy
A few years ago, Kathryn Tucker, a film producer and app developer, was writing what she describes as “a romantic comedy about net neutrality.” She got stuck and, in what sounds like a plotline from a...
View ArticleMusical Gold
One morning in February, Matthew Allain, the senior managing director of the Leo Group, a private wealth-management company, visited a town house on Central Park West in order to discuss an unusual...
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