Two new movies emphasize the singer’s spirit of defiance and political courage.

Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath were all guests. For some women, it was a launch pad. For others, it was a trap.

The essays in “Bland Fanatics” trace today’s crises to a long history of violent colonial oppression.

“A Promised Land” tells of a country that needed a savior.

How could someone so telegenic, so witty, and skilled in politics have missed out on higher office?

In a career of many flops, he laid claim to the outsized success of Marvel Comics.

Eulogies for the creative class are premature. Art workers can organize—and survive.

Don DeLillo’s and Jonathan Lethem’s new novels imagine the end of electronic communication.

Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.

The new movie with Carey Mulligan takes a bold approach to a story of sexual assault.

It undermines equality and the common good.

The curious appeal of the country legend in a divided nation

He was the dean of American cooking. He embodied some of food culture’s most persistent problems.

The upheavals of Hong Kong’s history lie just beneath the surface of his greatest films.

More than iron, stone, or oil, wood explains human history.

Isabel Wilkerson compares American racism to structures of oppression in India and Nazi Germany.

The co-working company may have been doomed from the start. That didn’t matter.

In “Transcendent Kingdom,” a young Black woman refuses to be defined by other people’s narratives.

When Lucian Freud painted Paul, she felt reduced. When Paul paints her subjects, they are exalted.

The story of the country’s rise to dominance shows how it can step back.