A Bonkers Workplace Comedy About Life and Grief in Events

By Billy McEntee

DEC 22–JAN 23 | Theater

If you’ve dreaded going back into the office, Events confirms the return may be worse than you imagined. Much, much worse.

Judith Baumel with Catherine Parnell

SEPT 2022 | Books

The last time Judith Baumel and I engaged in conversation via the Brooklyn Rail was February 2020, during the before times. When Covid took over, life seemed to be in the breakdown lane, but that didn’t stop Baumel. She geared up an eclectic group of scholars and writers and artists for weekly Zoom conversations focused on the classics and, line by line, they made their way through Dante's Divine Comedy and are now halfway through Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Helen Dewitt’s
The English Understand Wool

By John Domini

DEC 22–JAN 23 | Books

New Directions has issued Helen Dewitt’s brief new fiction as a stand-alone text, one of their “StorybookND” series, a handsome little package. Once it’s unwrapped, though, out springs a midsummer’s night dream, a turbulent and amoral comedy, disrupting the sleep with its dodges and masks—altogether a delight. The English Understand Wool offers another spin snowball of a narrative, gathering weight as it slaloms the hills of Dewitt’s imagination.

Laurie Anderson with Paul D. Miller

JUNE 2022 | Art

On the occasion of Laurie Anderson’s exhibition, The Weather, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Editor-at-Large, Paul Miller spoke with Anderson on episode #483 of the New Social Environment. Their discussion touches upon Anderson’s attraction to the taboo, her desire to make a “walk-in comic book filled with words,” and her fascinating collaboration with a supercomputer at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.