“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.”

On the evolution of the Whitney Museum.

The melancholy comedy of the silent screen star.

The artists are leaving San Francisco.

Most people think they’d be thrilled to have their memoir snapped up for a movie. The author had a different, more troubled experience.

Tracking Spalding Grey’s descent towards suicide.

A week at Coachella with the rapper and some mushrooms.

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

The politics and rhetoric of Trevor Noah’s appointment as the new host of the Daily Show.

In 1992, a magazine story introduced the world to the photographs of Sally Mann. Here, she responds to the firestorm that article produced.

Life behind the Beatles curtain, with the man whose real name is actually Richard Starkey.

One famous critic (Adler) takes another (Pauline Kael) to task for a collection of reviews that is “without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos and director of the series finale, analyzes the final scene shot-by-shot.

On his anxiety as a teenager, the treatment he was given for it, and the way that the psychiatry of the day failed his family.

On the parallel sadness of Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop.

John Barrymore once had a totem pole on his Beverly Hills estate. But where did it come from?

An interview with the author, who died Monday.

Why do all those rugged coastlines, moors and stone buildings make England seem haunted?

Before The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen was just another literary novelist with a new book coming out.

A portrait of a comedian in the moment just before he becomes huge.

On Azealia Banks.

Kurt Cobain’s suicide sent his fans – and the local media – into a tailspin.

David Simon and Richard Price, two of the greatest crime storytellers of our time, talk about their craft.

Joseph Mitchell used composites in his non-fiction, invented characters and added flourishes to his facts. Does it matter?

Kamel Daoud’s celebrated retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger came within two votes of winning the Prix Goncourt. It has also made him a target of radical Islamists.