The New York Review of Books

Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991), written […]

Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1 might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, […]

In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in […]

Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969, bickering like siblings as they created some of the songs that would find immortality on the albums Let It Be and Abbey Road—one of the most magical involves the underappreciated musician Billy […]

On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her […]