Arts & Culture

Family | Arts & Culture | Parenting
The Mom in ‘Home Alone’ Is a Messy and Magnificent Model of Motherhood

Is Kate McCallister a “good mom”? That’s beside the point. Her example shows the shallowness of such standards: She loves her kid. She proves it.

Nov 16, 2022
Arts & Culture | Queer Life
As a Queer Author, I Thought I Had to Come Out Before My Books Did

Some misguided fans believe they are owed information about artists’ sexual and gender identities. As a queer writer myself, this worries me.

Nov 15, 2022
Places | Arts & Culture | Rekindle
Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi

Didion depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.

Nov 14, 2022
Arts & Culture | Art
Why Do We Only Value Artists Once They’re Dead?

It is hard not to see that the conditions in which an entity like ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ thrives are the same as those that devalue and exploit the labor of living artists.

Nov 8, 2022
Arts & Culture | Video Games
My Husband Woos Me on ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’

In contrast to the ways we tripped over one another in our real home, our Animal Crossing island gave me and my husband the space to appreciate each other at a distance.

Nov 3, 2022
Columns | Arts & Culture | Formation Jukebox
What Michelle Zauner’s “Paprika” Taught Me About Making Art (and Peace With It)

What a joy it is—a singular joy, an occasion for jubilee—to allow your art’s translation through another point of view.

Nov 3, 2022
Arts & Culture | Movies
Lessons In Lust and Life from ‘Dirty Dancing’

Like Baby, I was raised to be a nice Jewish girl, with all of that trope’s stifling implications.

Nov 2, 2022
Arts & Culture | Television
‘Bad Sisters’ Captures the Intensity of Having and Being a Sister

My sister is not my best friend. She is my sister. Those are fundamentally different relationships.

Nov 1, 2022
People | Arts & Culture | Language
Why I Started Writing Crossword Puzzles

But who decides what’s common knowledge?

Oct 27, 2022
Columns | Arts & Culture | The PettyCoat Chronicles
The Occult, Fear, and Crises of Faith in ‘The Witch’

According to ‘The Witch,’ there’s no surer way to invite evil in than by being reckless enough to try to play God.

Oct 27, 2022