Italy’s most famous comic-book creation, Diabolik, wears a signature jet-black bodysuit on his combat missions and kills without compunction. An amalgam of James Bond and the cat burglar Raffles (with shades of Cadbury’s Milk Tray Man), Diabolik speaks several languages and, with his physique rippling under spandex, is a seductive, if sinister, criminal mastermind. For […]

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This is a remarkable book. Where most studies of a single musical work will consider their subjects as things out there in the world, Michael Symmons Roberts writes from inside the composition that seized him as a student and has never let him go. He does not inspect Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of […]

The post Songs heavier than the air appeared first on TLS.

When you learn to shoot, you are taught to yield to the recoil. Don’t resist. Don’t anticipate. Let it move through you. The price of control is surrender. When a gesture is repeated enough, it hardens into meaning, a kind of narrative logic. And it is this logic – the juddering logic of recoil – […]

The post Taking aim appeared first on TLS.

After the 1990 general election, the state of Illinois found itself in a predicament. Democrats controlled the House and Senate in Springfield, while Republican Jim Edgar occupied the governor’s mansion. With legislative redistricting the following year, the Democrats would be unable to send a new map that the governor wouldn’t veto.

East Germany sealed the border between Berlin’s eastern and western sectors before building a wall that would divide the city for the next 28 years.

As transportation commissioner, I often hear from New Yorkers regarding their concerns about e-bikes. We have all seen it: riders who run red lights and fail to yield to pedestrians. This dangerous behavior puts both riders and pedestrians at risk, and it is a nuisance for everyone on our streets.

Showing that his loyalty to his own anti-vax mentality is greater than his loyalty to Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the dangerous quack atop the Department of Health and Human Services, has announced that he will be rescinding a half billion dollars in grants and contracts for the development of mRNA technology and vaccines.

Dear Eric: I’ve been married to a great guy for the better part of 30 years. We are empty nesters, and during Covid-19, I agreed to help my male cousin who became homeless. I knew my husband wasn’t wild about the idea, but he didn’t fuss about it, so we let him move in. Fast-forward […]

Pete Alonso finally said the quiet part out loud.

The novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, probably best known today for the garden she and her husband Harold Nicolson created at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, was born at Knole, a house that was left, when her father died, to her uncle. She had a nostalgic fascination for the Country House. Although she was not blind […]

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