Just shy of a week, January 25th marked the 15th year release anniversary of D’Angelo’s classic sophomore album, Voodoo . Saint Heron and some of our special artist friends reflect on the album, celebrating one of music’s greatest masterpieces. SOLANGE Voodoo is the church in which we all come to…

T he first time I met Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, they were wearing Rollerblades and Glazer was psyching herself up to simulate sex with a giant oak tree. Tucked out of view on a shady forest path in Prospect Park on a warm day in September, the stars and creators of Broad City were filming a…

On Sundays, a bit of the old New York reappears; Christopher Dobrowolski dined alone at Veselka. Brian Harkin for The New York Times The first of the Sunday night stalwarts arrived at Veselka, a 24-hour diner on Second Avenue, after midnight. A man with a cane made his way to a table, supported on…

‘She’s not like other people,” Mike Nichols e-mailed me when I first approached him about being interviewed with his legendary partner in comedy, the soulfully offbeat and intensely private Elaine May. “As you know she ignores publicity but we’ll see.” John Lahr profiled Nichols for The New Yorker…

“The audience and the director, it’s an S & M relationship, and the audience is the M.” Photograph By Ruven Afanador When Quentin Tarantino goes to the movies, he sits in the front. Not in the first row, where he’d have to move his head from side to side to see what’s happening in the corners, but…

Photo: Jason Wyche/Courtesy of Creative Time This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. 1. Emma Sulkowicz, Carry That Weight , at Columbia University Art is born of many things, among them righteous indignation, messianic rage, and the drive for justice. Emma Sulkowicz’s…

Notes on “Kim” Whether you liked it or not, whether you wanted to or not, you’ve spent a lot of 2014 thinking about Kim Kardashian. By Rachel Syme Illustrations by Victor Kerlow IN REVIEW: Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (Glu Games, Inc.) Kim Kardashian and Kanye West wanted to marry at Versailles. They…

Shakespeare used six words to pose the essential human choice: "To be, or not to be?" Elizabeth, a character in Ingmar Bergman's "Persona," uses two to answer it: "No, don't!" She is an actress who one night stopped speaking in the middle of the performance, and has been silent ever since. Now her…

What a word, “decline.” It’s directional: downward. It’s deferential: no, thank you. It connotes judgment, disappointment, and death. Movies can be about decline or symptomatic of it. Paul Thomas Anderson luxuriates in postlapsarian decline, the moment after Adam and Eve bit the fruit and we all…

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is one of the most imaginative and influential storytellers in modern history — an artist and writer of singular creative vision and a genius for rendering visible and comprehensible life’s subtlest nuances. She was Finland’s most revered literary celebrity and a recipient…

Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave the toast at The New Republic’s centennial gala in November. Last week, two-thirds of the people on the magazine’s editorial masthead resigned. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY TERESA KROEGER/GETTY Last Friday morning, Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and Guy Vidra, the…

Credit PHOTOGRAPH © GAIL ALBERT-HALABAN/COURTESY OF EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY Every apartment in Manhattan has a Napoleon complex. No matter the size or the neighborhood, they are all imbued, at least a little bit, with an aura of indignation. This is due, in part, to the ridiculously high cost of real…

Ofili in Malick Sidibé’s studio, in Mali. Ofili used a Sidibé photograph from 1963 in several works that he made in recent years in Trinidad, where he now lives. Credit Photograph by Malick Sidibé Chris Ofili paints in a dilapidated white cottage on Lady Chancellor Road, about ten minutes from…

"The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street" The market was rigged. They set out to change it: http://t.co/rTF6qL1Q0D (by Michael Lewis, @nytmag)

The set of “Jeopardy!” was given a shiny makeover last year, in preparation for the quiz show’s fiftieth birthday. The new look features that familiar, top-heavy, bubble-letter logo and a gorgeously tacky sunset backdrop that provides an odd companion to the sexless blue-and-white board. In…

Rae Ann Fera 09.26.12 8:00 AM When talking to creative freelancers, there’s one phrase that’s often repeated: "I don’t mean to sound cheesy or cliché but…" What follows that "but" ranges from waxing lyrical about the ability to control the professional and personal work they do, to an appreciation…

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see…

In the rapidly modernizing, constantly churning city of Nanjing, China, there is a legendary bridge, four miles long, where day after day, week after week, the desperate and melancholy and tormented come to end their lives. Most end up in the Yangtze River, 130 feet below. But some do not meet their…

In Sebastopol, Hopmonk Tavern, above, and the cafe portion of Aubergine Vintage Emporium & Café, below. Lianne Milton for The New York Times CLOSE to midnight one Saturday in Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, California, fog rolled in from the nearby Pacific Ocean, encompassing the town in thick, cool…

Park Slope in 1973 and a view from the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg last month. Left, Neal Boenzi/The New York Times; Damon Winter/The New York Times The floor-to-ceiling windows provided a panoramic view of Manhattan. But I was more interested in the foreground, below me — Brooklyn. New…

Knausgaard has an artistic commitment to ordinariness and inexhaustibility. Credit Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan / Pen American Center Walter Benjamin, in his great essay “The Storyteller,” written in the nineteen-thirties, argues that classic storytelling is structured around death. It is the fire…

S hould we talk about where we’ve just been? The group stage was one coup after another, a sequence of thrilling games that gradually dismantled the existing order of international soccer. The last two world champions died in their baths. Italy, never expected to be a real threat, went down…

I first discovered Cadaqués with Parisian friends, in my twenties.

The Devil & The Art Dealer: How 1,280 artworks stolen by Nazis were hidden in Munich apartment till 2012 http://t.co/5CtSC8alGX v @Digg

The Unlikely Ascent of Jack Ma, Alibaba’s Founder http://t.co/z4DePh9Ht7

At 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday in January, the massive main dance floor at Berlin's Berghain is full. Dino Sabatini, an Italian DJ with short dark hair, is playing hard, hypnotic techno to a crowd of shirtless gay men, disheveled dudes in sneakers and tiny women with tiny backpacks. Many of these…

Just read this Roger Angell story, "This Old Man," a 2nd time. What a beautiful, wise, perfect piece of writing: http://t.co/44QQwdxIyj

'True Detective' director Cary Fukunaga with Matthew McConaughey. Photo: HBO [Spoilers ahead if you have not seen the season finale of True Detective .] In the end, Marty and Rust found hope, a first step out of the heart of darkness, if not the answers to every last awful detail of the Childress…

Photo: HBO Last week, I spoke with True Detective production designer Alex DiGerlando about 13 props and set pieces from the series’ first seven episodes. This morning, I emailed with him about the finale’s giant stone maze, in which Rust, Marty, and Childress have their final faceoff. This is what…

This story has been appended to include a statement from Dorian Nakamoto received on March 19th when Newsweek was first contacted directly by Mr. Nakamoto's attorney, denying his role in Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the end of his sunbaked driveway looking timorous. And annoyed. He's wearing…

"All About Eve—and Then Some" A profile of Eve Babitz -- - muse, writer, LA party girl: http://t.co/gPSgEtFsPh (by @LiliAnolik, @VanityFair)

The Case of Ai Weiwei's "Million-Dollar" Broken Vase: http://t.co/YhcEoAniW1

'She Lit a Fire' A new music video by Lord Huron. February 19, 2014. OAKLAND, Calif. — Ask Ben Schneider to name the inspiration for his band, Lord Huron, and he will name George Ranger Johnson, one of the more prolific Western adventure novelists you’ve never heard of. That’s because Mr. Schneider,…

“Good-bye, MoMA. I loved you.” Jerry Saltz on the MOMA expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro http://t.co/jE4KuF1Kc1

A few weeks into the making of Her , Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough. After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead…

Owen Freeman IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was…