Laura Poitras shared a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting based on Edward Snowden’s leaks and won an Oscar for her film “Citizenfour.” Her latest project is neither documentary nor journalism but a museum exhibition at the Whitney, “Astro Noise,” which continues her investigations into mass surveillance through installation art. Poitras walked David Remnick through the show—which is named after one of the encrypted N.S.A. files that Snowden gave her)—and explained how it aims to connect viewers to the central themes of her work through emotions rather than information.
The Theatre
Politics and “The Real” at the Festival d’Avignon
A series of international productions held power to account at a fraught moment.
By Helen Shaw
Flash Fiction
“Anatoly”
It wasn’t so much his conviction that upset him as the fact that he wasn’t put in a high-security prison, where, Anatoly believed, the real terrorists went.
By Oleh Sentsov
Letter from Las Vegas
Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere
A run of lost Las Vegas weekends for Deadheads prompts a longtime fan to wrestle with what the band has left behind.
By Nick Paumgarten