Malcolm Peel

The world of Don’t Worry Darling is picture-perfect at a glance: a company town called Victory, California, where a bunch of mid-century-modern homes have magically sprouted in the…
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The Toronto International Film Festival has long marked the start of the fall movie season, the time when new releases finally start to transition from mass-appeal blockbusters to…
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This year, the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week arrived in the midst of a renewed push to limit the literature children can access. Schools and libraries…
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When George Lucas first started envisioning the story of Star Wars, he researched kids’ films to understand “how myths work,” he told The Atlantic in 1979. He seemingly wanted to…
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Midday on a Monday in Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, Björk walked into a coffee shop and gave me a riddle. Just that morning, our interview had been rescheduled to an hour earlier…
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Spirited Away came out in 2001, when I was 8. After watching it in a Japanese cineplex, I stumbled out into a wall of late-summer heat, shaken by what I had just seen: the…
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In the world of Gwendoline Riley’s novels, a parent’s love is not to be trusted. What should come innately here seems skewed and conditional. A reader gets the clear sense that…
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Shira Mandelzis fell in love with flag football while playing on her middle-school team. An avid snowboarder and all-around athletic kid, she loved the energy she felt while on the…
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Many works of history are much less about the past than they are about the present. People contemplate past events to understand current problems, and in today’s fractured America,…
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Though we live in a supposedly secular era, at least one spiritual tradition appears to be thriving: pop musicians flouting the devout. In the past few years, Lil Nas X has given…
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