Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Barbra Streisand called me on a Tuesday afternoon. Well, to be more accurate, one of her many publicists did, and then patched me into Streisand’s home in Malibu (well, really, a…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story You may have seen the recent meme involving the phrase “the feminine urge to,” followed by some pithy example of melancholy or chaotic behavior. “The feminine urge to stop replying to…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Nixon often divides the world into “thinkers” and “actors,” but she is an actor with a talent for channelling thinkers.PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAUDE MEDALE / CORBIS VIA GETTY When Cynthia Nixon was…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Halfway through the first act of Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show, “Notes from the Field,” Smith, whose plays are made up of what she calls “portraits” of Americans, takes on…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story More than telling a story, shaping performances, or conveying emotions, the art of directing is creating a unified spectrum of experience. A good director is like a powerful magnetic field whose…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story As the COVID-19 pandemic eases, a mental-health crisis still has us in its grip. My fellow-psychiatrists and I continue to be flooded with referrals, desperate calls, emergencies, and relapses—likely the consequences…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In December, 2020, in the depths of pandemic winter, the actress Kimiko Glenn got a foreign-royalty statement in the mail from the screen actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA. Glenn is best known for…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story For most of the film, the wolf, named Naya, is camera-shy, somehow evading the hundreds of cameras that have been set up to view her. In the middle of a dusty…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story In May, I was confronted with a robot version of my writer self. It was made, at my request, by a Silicon Valley startup called Writer, which specializes in building artificial-intelligence…
Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story At the center of “The Life of the Mind” (2021), Christine Smallwood’s comic novel about the vagaries of contemporary academia, are two scenes designed to mirror each other. In the first,…
