Judith Lewis

(Photo by Ted Soqui)

Daniel Day-Lewis: The Way He Lives Now

Judith Lewis
“You don’t meet the book when you meet the writer,” the novelist William Gibson has said. “You meet the place where it lives.” A relatively uncontroversial remark about the people who vent their imaginations on the page — no one should expect Philip Roth to sound exactly like Nathan Zuckerman......

The World on Fire

Judith Lewis
This is October in Southern California. At the beach, the horizon is a murky bank of clouds, with just a hint of yellowish brown, like a can of ivory paint into which someone has accidentally dropped a little dried blood. On the television news, they repeat the graphic animation of......

Best Concierge Service for Slackers (and Their Spoiled Dogs)

Judith Lewis
I don’t know what my pet sitter does when I’m gone. Does she light incense and chant to cast a spell? Does she get out her pendulum and practice hypnosis? Or is it something she wears on her skin, some dewy fragrance that works on four-leggeds the way the piper’s......

Best Way to Get Ripped

Judith Lewis
“Your skin is really dry,” Elisha says as she prepares to roll a tube of hot honey wax across my furry calf. “I know,” I admit. “I usually put Aveeno on my legs but . . .“ Elisha shrieks. “Aveeno! That’s toxic!” “But I thought it was . . .“ “TOXIC!” she repeats. “. . . hypoallergenic.” “Do......

Best Way to Get All the Way Through Moby-dick in a Weekend

Judith Lewis
Back in the days when whales stove ships and not the other way around (of course, the men on those ships had harpoons, but that’s another story), Herman Melville wrote a book. Mid-19th-century critics were not unanimous in their praise; even some of the author’s friends were wishy-washy. (You can......

Blue Whale Requiem

Judith Lewis
ON SEPTEMBER 11, as pod after pod of massive endangered blue whales migrated through Southern California’s waters, lingering in unusual numbers off the coast ne...

Something in the Air

Judith Lewis
It was 2001, a few weeks after hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Bush administration had withdrawn its campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. U.S. delegates had walked out of international climate-treaty talks at Kyoto. And horror auteur Larry Fessenden began to......

The Black Rock Diaries

Judith Lewis
It’s Sunday night on the playa at the end of the Burning Man Festival, and the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, in ivory preacher’s garb and playafied blond-streaked hair, is giving a sermon about forgiveness. A choir sings gospel behind him, and a crowd of a few......
(Photos by Kevin Scanlon)

Jodie Foster: Chaos Control

Judith Lewis
There was a time in Jodie Foster’s life when she was on the verge of giving up acting. She no longer found it rewarding, this business of saying someone else’s lines as if they were her own; she found herself wishing for a profession that would challenge her and make......

Sympathy for the Van Man

Judith Lewis
It’s around 10 p.m. when we hear the sound. A clanking and crashing, the sound of metal on metal, and metal on something not metal. Then, a dull thud. Some muffled voices, a groan, followed by . . . someone breaking up trash to fit in a dumpster? Maybe detritus from the......