On Tuesday morning, Dan Gelber, the mayor of Miami Beach, stepped out of City Hall and walked the half block lined by botanical gardens to the city’s convention center, flanked by a small crew of staffers. A press conference was set to start, and Gelber took a seat onstage next to the people who run the […]

McDonald stars alongside Bryce Pinkham, Mister Fitzgerald, Lizan Mitchell, and Abigail Stephenson in the production directed by Tony-winner Kenny Leon. In 1989, Adrienne Kennedy was commissioned to write a play by her hometown playhouse—the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. The resulting work was in part inspired by her experience as an undergraduate at Ohio State University as a […]

Kith and Kin A Smithsonian exhibition explores complex bonds. “Kinship is a sense of shared recognition and trust,” says Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. That word is also the title of the gallery’s winter show, comprising work by eight artists, including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Anna Tsouhlarakis, and Jess T. […]

Growing up, I was one of those kids who was just a little too obsessed with other people’s families. I would linger just a little too long during playdates, stay a little after breakfast at sleepovers, peer into friends’ cupboards. I wanted to know how real families worked. Their mechanics fascinated me. Siblings seemed like […]

Two opposing but not mutually exclusive stories about our current political scene appear in this issue, an apt way to begin a year that will be the gathering before the storm. Let’s start with one perspective: optimism. As Eric Lutz reports in his column “From the Brink,” in the places where election denial was on […]