Onondaga Lake has been so thoroughly despoiled for so long that much of the waterfront is undeveloped and now exists in a postnatural state of sylvan tranquillity

The dense, novelistic detail of Perlstein’s books has a purpose: to remind us of a friable, dispirited, suspicious country, more skeptical of its own myths, that now seems unimaginably distant

A motorcycle racer and art student who heads to New York in the mid-Seventies with an inchoate ambition, Reno swiftly moves from the outskirts of the city’s conceptual art circles to its center.

There is something excoriating about sitting in the dark next to someone you love, watching a movie about love, knowing both stories are going to end badly.

To cast Johansson as the film’s voice is as perfect as casting Phoenix — whose lambent eyes, cleft-lip scar, and tendency to shy lend him an almost equine grace — as its face