‘The Peasants’ Review: A Village Rendered in Oils

As a young girl, I inherited my mother’s library of Betty Cavanna books. Cavanna was a Y.A. novelist who wrote sensitive, intelligent coming-of-age stories about teenagers, often featuring well-researched milieus: a struggling Vermont inn, a Pennsylvania ranch, a fishing community. “Paintbox Summer,” in which the aimless protagonist is sent to Cape Cod to work as…

Dear listeners, When Billy Joel was working on what would become his breakout 1977 album, “The Stranger,” he played the opening chords of the title track for his producer Phil Ramone, whistling a melody that he imagined another instrument would play in the final recording. “I whistle the whole thing and I finish,” he wrote…

The Istanbul Biennial, one of the European art world’s major events, was thrown into disarray on Friday when its lead curator stepped down and the event was postponed until 2025. Divisions in the art world over the biennial’s choice of Iwona Blazwick, a British curator, to oversee the event had made it “impossible” for the…

When Kaveh Akbar was drinking, he would regularly wake up to find new bruises or gashes on his body, or to find that he’d lost his glasses, his wallet or his car. When he opened his eyes, he might find himself in an alley instead of in his apartment. Once, he got out of bed…

A grand jury in New Mexico indicted Alec Baldwin on Friday on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, reviving the criminal case against him in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” more than two years ago when a gun he was rehearsing with went off. The indictment, which came…

Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid…