Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Architects and designers are often left carrying out the orders of developers interested only in maximizing profits. But a new book argues they have a vital role to play in transforming our built environment in a world transformed by climate change.
Lucrecia Martel’s latest film, Nuestra Tierra, the director’s first documentary, juxtaposes the fragility of colonial narratives with the strength of indigenous peoples’ collective identity formed through fighting the dispossession of their land.
Intermezzo, the latest novel by Sally Rooney, trots out some well-worn gender tropes from on and off the page.
The problem with artificial intelligence isn’t that robots will replace us at work but that they will make us less human.
A passionate search for America’s utopian communes inadvertently reveals what’s wrong with building enclaves of progress cut off from the real world.
Ling Ma’s new short story collection, Bliss Montage, leads us down strange, stimulating paths — and then leaves us before we can fully gather our bearings.
In novelist Nell Zink’s new book, Avalon, we might not recognize her characters’ circumstances, but we might recognize ourselves in their near-feral stupidity.
The Alden StaRRcar was a noble but failed attempt to combine the virtues of public and private transport.
Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour is a novel for our time of uncertainty.
Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is German neoliberalism in one building — retrograde, pompous, and built on the ruins of socialist modernism.
At its best, the original Sex and the City took the romantic lives of its characters seriously while presenting them hilariously. But its reboot, And Just Like That . . . , has sucked all the fun out of its stories.
No lyricist and composer treated their audience more like adults — capable of wrestling with the ambiguities and tragedies of life, without needing big, dumb heroes or happy endings — than Stephen Sondheim.
Buildings’ design communicates the values of a society. In contemporary American architecture, those values appear closer to control and surveillance than openness and enjoyment for all.
In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the biggest obstacles aren’t material. They’re the barriers to connection and love the protagonists put in their own way.
Leos Carax’s Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is audacious. But the film thwarts its own truth-telling ambitions by refusing to put its characters’ inner turmoils in dialogue with anything but themselves.
Music gives tangible shape to the best and basest in all of us. Yet under capitalism, it’s just another commodity. That artists and critics continue making and writing about music despite the industry’s vampiric drive for profit shows our stubborn unwillingness to give up a key piece of our humanity.
I love Nora Ephron. The world needs more Nora Ephrons. There are potential Noras all around us — they, and we, deserve a society that supports and nourishes and encourages them.
Downtown Chicago’s wonderfully futuristic, bizarre Thompson Center integrates government, business, public art, affordable eating, and public protest space — and it’s currently in danger of demolition. The Thompson Center must be preserved; its architectural spirit is too interesting — and the public space it provides too exceptional — to discard.
In her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel insists on a basic point: changing the kind of bad and damaging sex that women all too often have in a sexist society can’t fall solely on individual women.
Most new architecture, like Amazon’s proposed new HQ, is hideous. That’s because it is made for corporations. Despite all the mistakes and brutalities of the Soviet experiment, at least their architecture was designed to serve the people instead.