Early into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, narrator Chiamaka, or “Chia,” muses on the two women who matter most to her. There is her best friend, “organized, buttoned-up, ambitious” Zikora, a successful lawyer who has been less fortunate in marriage. There is her cousin Omelogor, a former banker, who is bracingly forthright and ruthlessly single-minded. […]

Everything you need to know about Leonardo da Vinci is contained in the work he did in the 1480s and 1490s for Ludovico Sforza — Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan. To call Ludovico a mercurial man is to employ far too weak a word. Ludovico was vacillating, spasmodic, and two-faced, a bipolar figure […]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the […]

In the era of peak Oscars, the movies commemorated were, at worst, honorably decent and, at best, the sort of sumptuously mounted, inoffensively impressive super-spectacles that the industry had good reason to be proud of: Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, Amadeus, The Last Emperor, The English Patient, and, inevitably but justifiably, Titanic. By the same token, […]