Film
The Timely Resonance of PBS’s Asian Americans
The new miniseries offers an informative overview of history through personal, often deeply emotional testimony.
Review
Art
These Interactive Documentaries Look at 3D-Scanned Desserts and Earth From Orbit
Public Update, a new series from POV Spark, presents its first slate of unconventional nonfiction works.
Books
An Ebay Purchase That Revealed the Everyday Lives of French Surrealists
Reading between the lines of contact information for friends, graphologists, psychoanalysts, and plumbers, Brigitte Benkemoun’s Finding Dora Maar reveals a map of a bygone France.
Books
Olivia Laing’s Essays Make a Case for Why Art Matters in Turbulent Times
As exterior life shuts temporarily down, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is a useful reminder that connection can be intellectual as well as physical.
Books
Susan Howe's Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
Books
Questioning the Very Form of the Book
Madeline Gins uses the form to dislodge our notion of individual subjectivity, the narrator commonly known as “I.”
Books
The Media’s Brave New World
Two new books focusing on journalism and news, and on how they are delivered, offer expansive visions of what “the media” have become.
Art
An Artist as Resilient as She Is Joyous
Few artists have reinvented themselves in their prime the way Jo Smail has; few have had to.
Books
Lifestyle Over Life: Stephen Wright’s Vision of America
Wright’s darkly comic novel burrows into our hollow cravings, and finds more hollowness.
Art
Norman Bluhm's Sensual Spiritualism
Norman Bluhm transformed the vocabulary we associate with the gestural branch of Abstract Expressionism into something that others of the so-called Second Generation did not pursue, much less attain.
Books
The Central, Yet Invisible, Labor of Motherhood in Art
Curators, scholars, artists, and designers reflect on the labor and experience of motherhood in the new essay collection Inappropriate Bodies.
Film
What Happened When Eight People Were Sealed Inside a Self-Contained Ecosystem
Director Matt Wolf talks to Hyperallergic about his new documentary Spaceship Earth, which reconsiders the infamous Biosphere 2 experiment.