David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications.
All in Daily Beast
Phillip Santos Schaffer’s “Baby Jessica’s Well-Made Play” uses the mine-fall drama that transfixed America to examine connection and empathy, with the audience in a starring role.
Forensic Architecture’s research led to the resignation of Whitney board member Warren B. Kanders. The group’s founder, Eyal Weizman, reveals how they combine art and activism.
John Lithgow played Trump, Kevin Kline played Robert Mueller, and Alyssa Milano played Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow. But the very starry ‘The Investigation’ told us nothing new.
The 2019 Whitney Biennial is the first edition of the prestigious survey of contemporary American art of Donald Trump's presidency, and he is an unavoidable presence.
There are some beautiful works of art at the Armory Show and New York's other art fairs. But you will also become extremely aware of the extravagant lives of the super-rich.
“Frankenstein does feel a bit like the accumulation of everything we have learned over the past eight years. It’s pulling out all the stops to make something crazy complicated”
They flirt, they fight, they make silly jokes, they snort coke and dance and drink and dance and sing and make music using serving tongs as castanets”
A new show at the New York Historical Society is less about two men who barely knew each other, than it is the story of the civil rights movement in America.
Music geekdom is a terrible affliction. You have to mostly suffer in private, since who among your friends and loved ones could ever understand that the original Miles Davis Quintet isn’t jazz so much as pure gold distilled into the form of sound, or that the Chicago post-rock scene in the late 1990s rivaled the grunge scene in Seattle in the early ’90s for its brilliance and depth or that no, you can’t go out tonight, you have to go home and listen to the first Faces album on repeat.
There is something about staring out at the colossus of New York, or walking among its teeming multitudes, that inspires even the most amateur urban planner to envision ripping the whole thing apart and starting over.
The Vietnam War remains the eternal American scar. A New York Historical Society exhibition combines the political and personal to build an affecting portrait of the conflict.
And long before Donald Trump called for a border wall or accused Mexico of sending its rapists and drug dealers into the United States, the county executive of Suffolk, Steve Levy, emerged on the national scene as a virulent anti-illegal immigrant hardliner, giving voice to a strain of political rhetoric that had previously been the sole province of talk radio, and that would later reach full flower in the Trump campaign.
“It used to be fearless, provocative, fun—where’s the fun gone from the Street, it’s boring, fuck it,
A body, killed dead by the state, lies unburied in full public view. The authorities say that the corpse deserves to be punished, that the body is that of an invader’s, someone who is a danger and a threat to the community. Chaos ensues, as the community grapples with notions of justice and fairness.
In Zayd Dohrn’s play ‘The Profane,’ a romance brings conservative and liberal Muslim beliefs into emotional opposition.
‘The Hairy Ape’, as staged in the 55,000 square foot space of NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, is a work of art: a painting, or a puppet show perhaps. You don’t see it, so much as sink into it.
Until it folded in 1973, Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review mixed erotica and cutting-edge writing with incendiary results. Now it’s back, with literary bad boy Dale Peck in charge.
Rob Pruitt was home watching MSNBC on election night when it became clear that the results were not going to go as he imagined they would.
