Articles
Reviews
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.
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. Atria/One Signal Publishers, 288 pp., $29.
I’m not sure how I feel about a team many times the size of the New York Philharmonic fine-tuning a formula of Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson hits with which to drip-feed me throughout the day. Actually, I take that back. I hate it.
Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat. Milkweed Editions, 360 pp., $20.
Like Shakespeare’s Prospero—who ultimately abjures his “rough magic” and drowns his book of spells—Kabat implies that addressing climate crisis requires not merely technological innovation but philosophical reorientation.
Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive, curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, is on view at Abrons Arts Center through January 6, 2026.
The Settlement’s communitarian, social-reformist spirit embedded itself in the Lower East Side, including in its architecture.
Rosario Candela and the New York Apartment: 1927–37 by David Netto, Peter Pennoyer, and Paul Goldberger. Rizzoli, 304 pp., $45.
Nothing so good will be built again in New York City, not for the billionaires nor anybody else.
The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin and William C. McKeown (ed.) University of Toronto Press, 1,040 pp., $150.
Ruskin was writing, between the lines, against Victorian England’s industrial society, to save his homeland from a revolution he knew it deserved.
Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park was closed in the spring of 2023, just prior to its demolition and wholesale reconstruction. Reopened this past August, the park features a landscape by AECOM and a pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners.
New York’s coastline is homogenizing as it hardens and greens.
The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal. Picador, 384 pp., $32.
For activists of air, the atmosphere is not only “up there” but comes from, and returns to, the ground.
Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise is open at the Hammer Museum through November 16, 2025.
NOX presents consciousness not as humanity’s exclusive domain, but an emergent property that brings with it inevitable suffering.