Is the New York subway the city’s best gallery?
Beneath the Big Apple’s streets, the MTA has amassed the largest collection of public art in the world
Books and Arts
Thursday
Why are there no paintings in Star Wars?
They are not talked about, reflected upon or even alluded to
Lana Del Rey’s new record: samey, stale, sterile
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd could have been better
The importance of going to the movies
Something happens when you watch a movie alone together, laughing, crying and fidgeting in unison
Sunday
Shipwrecks, amputations and polar-bear attacks: the doomed voyage of the Karluk
Rudyard Kipling would have appreciated this book
Andrey Kurkov brings clarity to the Ukraine invasion
The highest compliment that can be paid to Kurkov’s diary is that it is not a work of art
Friday
The quiet rise of Outback Noir
A new subgenre of Australian detective fiction is gaining global acclaim
Tuesday
A stripped back Doll’s House on Broadway
The difference between a divorce and a funeral seems lost on the director Jamie Lloyd
Saturday
Why were 2000s movies so hypersexual?
Are we decent yet?
Wednesday
How America influenced George Orwell
The legendary British author’s attitude to the US is curiously double-edged
Tuesday
Drinking with Picasso
To mark the half-century since Picasso’s death, I invited two art experts to lunch at Els Quatre Gats
Saturday
There’s more to Pamela Anderson than Playboy and sex tapes
Unfortunately, most of Love, Pamela fails in its quest for victimhood and intellectualism
Monday
The difficulties of writing historical fiction
Historians ask ‘What?’ Novelists ask ‘What if?’
Why does a new Tolkien biography remain elusive?
His books and television adaptations keep coming, but we know little of J.R.R. Tolkien’s life
Vince McMahon: the modern-day P.T. Barnum who changed America
The new biography Ringmaster unpacks a controversial legend
Tom Crewe’s The New Life is sophisticated, intelligent and gripping
This book doesn’t pretend that its subjects are twenty-first century people in different clothes
The enigmatic rise of Colleen Hoover
Meet the world’s bestselling author, a self-made forty-three-year-old mom you probably haven’t heard of
The magnetism of His Dark Materials
Pullman’s color palette is of vibrant grays. He rejects absolute goods and evils
Greg Lansky: the artist with a scandalous past
As an adult film magnate, he profited off the broken aspects of our society for years
Mary Blair, doyenne of Disneyland
To preserve an outsider artist such as her, you have to preserve the messy reality of life