Rachel Syme

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Rachel Syme

In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, “Born This Way,” did something unexpected—at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I’m not talking about the way she’d shown up at the Grammy Awards that year, nestled inside a giant plexiglass egg that was paraded into the venue atop a rustic palanquin.

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Rachel Syme

4 hours agoLady Gaga just dropped her newest album, Mayhem, and has made it clear that much of the project was inspired by Trent Reznor’s legendary industrial band, Nine Inch Nails—specifically, their biggest song, “Closer.” She recently opened up about her love of Reznor during an appearance on Howard Stern’s …

2 months ago | criterion.com | Rachel Syme |Shonni Enelow

Essays— Feb 18, 2025 In November of 1988, just a few months after the release of her fourth feature film, Crossing Delancey, the fifty-three-year-old director Joan Micklin Silver gave an interview at the American Film Institute, in which she made a passionate case for women’s pictures, by which she meant pictures directed by—and therefore thoroughly infused with the sensibility of—women.

Jan 3, 2025 | newyorker.com | Rachel Syme

In today’s newsletter, reflecting on time with the “Severance” star, and then:Graham Norton, comedy butlerA political scientist on Israel’s widening warMarianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance for the agesRachel SymeStaff writerAt first glance, the people I wrote about in the past year—the filmmaker Sofia Coppola, the theatre director Rachel Chavkin, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, and now, for this week’s issue, the actor Adam Scott—would seem an eclectic bunch, with little in common.

Dec 22, 2024 | newyorker.com | Rachel Syme

In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas.