Sublime

The tradition started, oddly enough, with a hospital. In 1443, Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, founded the Hospices de Beaune and endowed the foundation with vineyards to provide it with income. Other charitable Burgundians followed his example, and today, more than five hundred years later, the hospital costs are

invective

Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well regarded, famous.

This utopia was short-lived. It was being replaced by a late-capitalist hellscape, my friends reported. Rents were spiking. Art galleries and music venues were closing. Bars were overrun with men in their twenties wearing corporate-branded T-shirts, men who never finished their beers and complained whenever anyone on the sidewalk smoked a cigarette

The Left Bank is historically mesmerizing and sumptuous, but if you live on one side of Paris—say, on the Left or Right Bank—you rarely cross the river to visit the other side. Once you’re in a neighborhood, that’s where your life is. It helps to think of Paris as a collection of small villages bundled together, each one offering its own butchers,

Los Angeles in 1927 was America’s fastest-growing city, and its richest when measured per capita. The population of greater Los Angeles, including the unincorporated communities of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, had more than doubled in a decade to almost 2.5 million, and those lucky citizens were 60 percent better off than the average American

Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s

Sugar Hill, one of the city’s most prosperous Black middle-class areas, was destroyed in 1954 for the Santa Monica Freeway. Basically, L.A. was a profoundly unequal society designed to benefit whites, with precedents big and small. Charlotta Bass, editor and publisher of the Black newspaper The California Eagle, noted in 1938, “Here in Los Angeles,