Nancy Reagan’s Cross to Bear
The First Lady dedicated herself to achieving a picture-perfect life. A look at her traumatic—and covered-up—childhood helps explain why
Emergency Exit
Come out of hiding with these songs from the Animals, Junior Parker, Lyn Collins, Animal Collective, and more
A Happy Accident
Fame didn’t come overnight for Tony-winning actor John Cullum. The film An Accidental Star traces his road from the American South to the Broadway stage
Opera Pick of the Week
The Zurich Opera streams a new production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Andreas Homoki
Doug Varone in Ten Acts
The choreographer’s first pandemic piece is a mini-series of short films, set to songs from the 1940s and 50s and produced through Zoom
The First Lady of the Skies
Between her record as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air and her disappearance a decade later, Amelia Earhart was the Eleanor Roosevelt of flying, championing women’s careers in aviation
Short List
Books to read this week, from a history of crime and punishment in ancient Rome to a novel of clashing cultures and an account of post–W.W. II recovery
Win or Die
Game of Thrones was a flop when it first aired 10 years ago. Its final episode set an all-time U.S. record with 16.5 million live viewers. What changed?
Has Hunter Biden Written the Season’s Best Book?
It’s up for debate—as is the best way to drop the lockdown weight, and what exactly makes someone the new It Girl
The H-Word
David Cowles and Josh Gosfield’s new magazine, Public Eye, invites great artists to create works based on a theme. First up: heroes, as introduced by the talk-show host in Public Eye’s opening pages
The Sex Queen of Paris
Madame Claude schooled high-priced prostitutes for clients such as J.F.K. and Onassis. Now she gets the Netflix treatment
Bon Voyage!
A new book collects the best of airport style, from an impossibly bouncy-haired Dolly Parton to Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin
Playing with Fyre
The bizarre, ongoing story of Billy McFarland, the mastermind behind the music-festival fiasco who started a podcast behind bars
Neon Dion
The Bronx’s doo-wop prince is also a soulful rock ’n’ roller whose catalogue is as deep as it is vast
Opera Pick of the Week
Munich’s Bavarian State Opera streams Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, starring American mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey
Notes from Underground
Harriet Tubman left behind no written history of her life, but her stories—of the Underground Railroad and the allies she made along the way—live on
Revisionist History
Churchill gets a bad rap for the 1943 Tehran conference, where Roosevelt and Stalin won out. Looking back, the Old Lion might have been right all along
Splendor in the Grass
The story of how Central Park and its beating heart, the bucolic Sheep Meadow, came to be
