Anthony Lane

Minneapolis

Freelancer at The New Yorker

Articles

The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true, pretty much, of Harold Wallace Ross, who begat The New Yorker. Until the first issue was published, on February 21, 1925, the magazine was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Yet the spirit of Ross, aided by his wife and co-begetter, Jane Grant, had been busy.
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Anthony Lane

1 hour ago‘I'm one American story’: Author Kao Kalia Yang resists being ‘the Hmong voice’This year marks 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota. In 1975, after the Vietnam War and after Communists took over …4 hours agoDon’t forget Bomber CommandThere were many tributes when John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last surviving fighter pilot of the Battle of Britain, died in March.
A Long, Hard Look at America

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

One of the strangest works of art in the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, is a painting by Jan Jansz Mostaert, who was born in Haarlem. It dates from around 1535 and bears the title “Landscape with an Episode from the Conquest of America.” In the right of the picture, a platoon of soldiers, heavily armed and preceded by a pair of gun carriages, tramp through a defile. Evidently, it is not long since they came ashore; behind them, we can spy a strip of beach.
Mixed Signals

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

The accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in a secret group chat of senior U.S. officials has been described as a breach of national security without historical precedent. This is not the case. 1252 B.C., eastern Mediterranean, Saturday nightOdysseus: O.K., we’re in. Diomedes: In where? Odysseus: Troy. We’re inside the walls. They bought it. Menelaus: By the golden toenails of Athena, we’re in Troy? In a freaking horse? Odysseus: Sh-h-h. Keep it down, dummy.
When Marvel Meets “Much Ado About Nothing”

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

Every age, we kid ourselves, gets the Shakespeare it deserves—or, with any luck, the Shakespeare it badly needs. Take a famous example: to read about the Federal Theatre Project’s production of “Macbeth” that opened at the Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem, in 1936, performed by an all-Black cast and directed by Orson Welles, is to be overwhelmed by a sense of something that had to happen. Any witch could see it coming. But what about eras of even greater distraction and disarray?
Gene Hackman’s Dangerous Smile

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

The circumstances surrounding the death of the actor Gene Hackman, at the age of ninety-five, have yet to be explained. On February 26th, his body was discovered at his home in Santa Fe, as was that of his wife, Betsy Arakawa. It is estimated that they both had been dead for more than a week. Foul play has not been entirely ruled out. The front door of the house was unlocked. It is less than fitting that an air of enigma should attend the final act of Hackman’s life.
The Classic Mystery That Prefigured the Los Angeles Wildfires

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower. If you’re lucky enough to have an Agave americana on your land, wary enough to stay clear of its sharp-toothed leaves, and patient enough to hang around for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, at last, with the sight of its butter-yellow blossoms.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack plans CSU course on helping small farms survive, thrive

Feb 10, 2025 | source.colostate.edu | Anthony Lane

During his first stint with Colorado State University, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack played a central role envisioning CSU Spur as a new kind of university campus that would engage learners of all ages in problem solving and discovery related to food, water, and human and animal health.
The Player’s the Thing in “Grand Theft Hamlet”

Jan 26, 2025 | newyorker.com | Anthony Lane

In an 1818 lecture, on the subject of “Hamlet,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:Coleridge was talking in particular about the eccentric babblings of the prince after he meets the ghost of his father—“wild and whirling words,” in the view of Horatio.
15分で一冊の本が読める要約アプリは、何を省略しているのか

Nov 21, 2024 | wired.jp | Anthony Lane

本を読まない理由はたくさんある。（1）読みたくないから。（2）読み始めて17ページまで進んだけれど、そこで諦めたから。（3）本を読もうと思ったことすらないから（そんな人はラッキーで、そのほうが満足が得られる）。（4）今日は金曜日で『WWEスマックダウン』をテレビで観なければならず、そのためマリリン・ロビンソンが創世記をテーマにして書いた至福の解釈書をそっと脇に置かなければならないから。（5）誰もが知るように、読書は「退屈」で、そんなことをするのは敗者ぐらいだから。あるいは（6）単純に時間がないから。では、本を読まなければならない場合は？...