Johnny Mathis Is Retiring From Touring After Almost 70 Years of Crooning

Johnny Mathis, a pop music singer and one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, said this week that he would perform only four more live concerts before retiring from touring after nearly 70 years. Known for his “velvet voice” on romantic ballads like “It’s Not for Me to Say” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” … Read more

12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring

Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar. ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ … Read more

New Songs From Mumford & Sons, Maren Morris, Lucy Dacus and More

Pablo Alboran, ‘Clickbait’ The Spanish pop songwriter Pablo Alboran usually deals in romance. But “Clickbait” confronts a different class of relationships: the parasocial ones online. “Many say they know me, but they have no idea who I am,” he complains in Spanish, with an Auto-Tuned edge. In Spanglish, he continues, “Flash flash, mucho clickbait, mucho … Read more

Molly Young on Space and Music

Dear readers, Do you know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut? The distinction rests on where the -naut was trained: Cosmonauts hail from Russia and astronauts from the United States, Canada, or Europe. Not China, though: The Chinese version is a taikonaut. If there exists another job with three different names of equally … Read more

How to Live in the Mall

When the artist Michael Townsend first told the documentarian Jeremy Workman about the time he and his friends lived in a secret apartment tucked inside the Providence Place Mall, Workman thought he was being punked. Then Townsend pulled out a cracked iPad to show Workman some grainy video. “I just was dumbfounded and blown away,” … Read more

5 Podcasts Where Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

There’s an overwhelming amount of news to keep up with right now, and it can sometimes feel impossible to look away or take a break. Getting absorbed in a truly compelling story can be a great antidote to doom-scrolling, and if focusing on fiction isn’t working, you can try a crazy-yet-true audio narrative. These five … Read more