A Royalist in the Era of No Kings

“These guys are all accelerationists,” Daniel Keller said. I pretended to know what the word meant, hurriedly Googling as he waxed on forebodingly about people like Peter Thiel. This was nine years ago. At the time I was working at Vogue, and Keller—then known primarily as an artist—had already begun drifting toward the stranger edges of internet culture and technology. Over the years he’s moved further in that direction, becoming a venture investor at the intersection of AI, robotics, and crypto. Recently I called Keller again, hoping for a cleanly optimistic case around AI and art...

All season it’s been a question of is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? Poised, beautiful, and always ready with a techbro-destroying one-liner, Meaghan Rath plays Anushka Bhattachera-Phister, the stifled Chief Ethics Officer at a thinly-veiled Apple analogue, who also sits on the board of a Palantir-like data algo company called Hypergnosis. Like all of us living through the age of algorithmic everything, she’s often screaming into the wind, shrugged at or straight-up ignored by those in power around her. The bros ignoring her aren’t exactly thriving either. They question their...

Nothing’s more interesting than a man with an obsession. Mickey Boardman, the iconic longtime editor of Paper Magazine, has many. Among them: the comings and goings, the gossip and gowns, the family trees and family secrets of Europe’s royals. Across his Substack, his Instagram, his journalism, and his decades of party RSVPs, Boardman’s joyful relishing of his favorite tiara-toting ladies of high birth has been a constant—an innocent pastime, a glamorous distraction shared with his readers and followers. But for Boardman, who aside from being a dedicated royalist is also a committed leftist, the era of No Kings has left him wondering...

The richness of still life lies in the sensuous rendering of materials—the sparkle of glass, the shimmer of silk, the bloom of fruit—each object inviting the eye to linger.

—Claus Grimm

Today, the ruling right-wing powers in this country are no laughing matter. The Constitution is in tatters, the weak are scapegoated, our allies are insulted and enemies given succor, and inflation and deficits are soaring. But the comedians coming from the conservative camp? Even a lefty has to admit they are funny as hell...

Dree Hemingway has the rare quality of seeming slightly out of time. Part of it is the name, of course, one that arrives trailing a century of literary mythology, but it’s also...

For many people outside Africa, Rwanda remains frozen in 1994 when the country's genocide left nearly a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead. The Rwanda that exists today is something else entirely; it is often described as the “Rwandan Miracle.” Over the past three decades, as reconciliation has progressed, GDP has grown rapidly, Kigali is increasingly positioned as a center of technology and investment...

When Emma Stefansky was in college in the early 2010s, she remembers feeling like “getting an internet media job was the cool thing to do, and everyone...

It’s a December morning in Miami, and Zoe Buckman is taking me on a brief tour of her temporary kingdom: a hotel room somewhere above the chaos of Art Basel. Moments earlier we'd been discussing Brooklyn brownstones—ours are in the same neighborhood—and she compliments her Zoom view of mine, though I know for a fact hers is prettier. “I fucking love our neighborhood,” she replies.

In 1911, Paul Poiret put on what today would be called a viral stunt: hundreds of people packed his Paris maison for "One Thousand and Two Nights," an extravagant fancy dress ball with exotic animals and decorations, champagne flowing all night, and an exorbitant price tag. It was luxury not just as product, but as...

For a country that thinks about food constantly, Americans are remarkably bad at actually eating well. We invented the $20 superfood smoothie, fight about which dietary philosophy is the most effective, and have more nutrition information at our fingertips than any generation in history. And yet, with diet-related disease among the leading cause of death in the US and over 19 million people living in food deserts, we are one of the least healthy...

The second time around, Mad Men shifts. It steps into a new light, more seductive but also more complex, darker but also brighter. It was already a throwback when it aired—nostalgia for the early 1960s, for the gray-flannel confidence of American capitalism, for a time when a man could smoke through a meeting and still be...

Be it the embroidered certainties of historical drama or the controlled panic of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, we are living through a moment that makes escapism feel especially potent. Of late, Nicole Brydon Bloom has become a compelling presence in both genres. On HBO's The Gilded Age and Hulu's Paradise, she plays women who arrive as polished surfaces that hide ill intentions beneath—duplicitous characters who themselves are playing well-choreographed roles. Offscreen, Bloom comes across as markedly more grounded: a New York actor whose life, even as it has grown more public, seems oriented toward privacy, and the ordinary rituals that keep a person sane.

It seems fitting to start with a memory. Twenty years ago, more or less, sinking for the first time into the world of Joachim Trier watching his debut feature Reprise, stumbling out of the Angelika dazed afterwards, as if surprised to find myself in New York City and not Norway. I think it was the Angelika? I’m almost sure. Or maybe that’s where I saw...

At one point early in her career, Jessica Henwick pulled an all-nighter blowing up balloons. The Surrey-born actress was scraping by in Los Angeles, making ends meet working as a set dresser on film sets. The task? Prepare a wedding scene that required roughly two thousand balloons. When the production’s air tanks ran out, she had to f inish the job by hand—or rather, by mouth.

On a blustery Vienna night in December 1896, Felix Salten walks into Café Griensteidl. The novelist sees his friend Karl Kraus sitting across the room, walks over, and slaps the man twice across the face. The entire café falls silent. Then, one imagines, someone orders another coffee. Kraus, the Nobel-nominated satirical essayist, was then a sharp-faced, twenty--two-year-old who had spent the better part of the year publicly excoriating everyone in the room.