Close Read

David Byrne’s first solo album post-Talking Heads helped me come to terms with the languages I lost growing up as a mixed-race kid.

Jonathan Glazer’s lush, romantic take on the gangster movie, Sexy Beast, uses the simplest of moments to build its sense of dread: a warm day, a clear pool, a frosty beer.

On Gregory Crewdson’s photograph “Untitled (Beer Dream),” the cover art for Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.

Before I read The View from Saturday, I saw anger as a luxury, a way to take up physical and emotional space that I didn’t think I deserved to occupy.

Sixty-five years after it was published, J.D. Salinger’s novel remains a definitive expression of adolescent trauma.

The photos on the author and New Yorker critic’s Instagram account can seem bouncily staged, as if he’d just held up his phone and made a suggestion, or a consolation, or a dig.