Articles
Reviews
In the rarefied, privileged enclaves of elegant urban life, downtown supermarkets like the one I remember from my hometown did not shut down but thrived and often became enduring cultural references.
Stories and Set Designs for The Sopranos ran from February 14 to May 31 at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Return to that precarious, aspirational year, 1997. Feel the disorientation the HBO execs must have felt watching that opening scene, which takes place in the least legible (for a mob show) of all the series’ spaces, Dr. Melfi’s office.
Crumbling Land, a project by Noah Gotlib, was on view at Citygroup from June 4 to August 1.
Insurers are retreating from risk-exposed regions, while authorities are failing to keep pace with the crises unfolding around them. Into this breach, Gotlib hopes, come citizens working in concert to navigate devastating changes.
Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor. Repeater, 240 pp., $17.
So much of what makes an otherwise innocuous home scary is dependent on where we look, how we move, and how long we linger—work the movie camera performs.
Antifascist Architecture by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche, with original drawings by Lane Rick. Parks Books, 256 pp., $40.
Too often in Antifascist Architecture, the architecture isn’t antifascist and the antifascism isn’t architecture.
Struggles in the Concrete: Architecture and the Marxist Tradition by Mark Crinson and Luisa Lorenza Corna (eds.). Birkhaüser, 240 pp., $40.
Socialism in one building?
Not content with the damage they’ve wrought, the people who destroyed Gaza are already considering what to erect in its place.
Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci. Seal Press, 288 pp., $30.
Some saw the wage as the goal. Others saw it as a tool—sometimes even a bludgeon—to break down received ideas about work and love.
Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley. Astra House, 224 pp., $28.
Shah has not always been truthful. But she is correct that fans of reality shows get a “g-string up their a** about” real estate.
The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold, was released in December 2025.
A World in the Making: The Shakers is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia through August 9.
The Shakers are hot, hot, hot right now.
The Queen of Versailles, starring Kristin Chenoweth and featuring music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, closed on December 21, 2025, after an abbreviated run on Broadway.
The Siegels’ self-made American dynasty falls so short of l’ancien régime that it’s almost touching.
Weeds: A Germinating Theory by Kwan Queenie Li. Mack Books, 160 pp., $28.
What would these weeds say of the city if they could talk?
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a film by William H. Whyte, was originally released in 1980. This past January, it was screened at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village and Low Cinema in Ridgewood, Queens.
How is it that where others saw something approaching civil war, Whyte alighted on a market utopia?
The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, organized by Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel with Joëlle Martin, is open on the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art through July 12.
More than anything else, Kurokawa was a consummate pitchman, armed with one Big Idea: the capsule.
What We Did Before Our Moth Days, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by André Gregory, is on at the Greenwich House Theater through May 24.
The fickle histrionics of lust and love are viewed from the vantage of their humbling little ends.
The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley. Allen Lane, 608 pp., $40.
Hatherley has remarked in passing that modernism was largely an “importation,” brought to Britain by exiles from Germany and surrounding states after 1933. Here, that thesis is systematically expounded.