By most measures, Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel “American Dirt” was a colossal success. A propulsive story about a Mexican mother and son who flee to the United States to escape a drug cartel, the novel sold for seven figures. It was an Oprah book club pick, won endorsements from best-selling …
It’s probably too much to show up at one of these Costume Institute shows looking for the object that ties the whole thing together. Just because they’re about clothes doesn’t mean they have to do what a smart outfit does. And yet damn if I didn’t find a single object …
Clarence O. Smith, who convinced skeptical mainstream advertisers of the power and worth of the Black female consumer market as a founder of Essence, the first general-circulation magazine directed at Black women, died on April 21. He was 92. Mr. Smith, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., died in a hospital …
Follow our live coverage of the 2025 Met Gala red carpet. Last October, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced its next fashion show, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the political landscape looked very different. Kamala Harris, the first female vice president and the first Black woman ever to …
A rehearsal of “The Central Park Five,” an opera about the Black and Latino boys wrongly convicted of raping a Central Park jogger, was just a few days old this month when the tenor who plays Donald J. Trump began to sing. “They are animals! Monsters!…Support our police! Bring back …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. Children in 1950s America grew up with a distinct image of the Old West through television heroes like the Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Hopalong Cassidy. They all …
Lonnie G. Bunch III has served as a museum director, educator and historian — all positions in which he has demonstrated a skill for diplomacy. But perhaps no amount of charm or discretion can help him avoid the fight he now faces over the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, the …
The dragon lady, the courtesan, the submissive beauty — these enduring stereotypes of Asian and Southeast Asian femininity circulated in Europe and America centuries before the vast majority of Westerners had ever laid eyes on a real flesh-and-blood woman from those parts of the world. A major, and maybe surprising, …
Chaos surrounded us. Informal porters rolling luggage carts zigzagged between cars. Commuters spilled from the bus terminal onto the sidewalk, where they sat on suitcases and duffel bags. Minibus taxis zoomed through the congestion, pedestrians be damned. Our car crawled past a barbed-wire fence and reached a sliding gate, where …
Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous. But the studio was feeling cocky. It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as …