Former White House Political Director Bill Stepien, from the January 6th hearings, courtesy US House The second day of hearings by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was held yesterday. The focus of its argument was tighter than on…
Her strength was both poise and pose, and her independence had to be on her own terms, because no one else cared about her terms but me. She had no standing, within a few years of my birth, socially, financially, professionally, or personally. Truth is, she may have felt a kind of freedom in not working for years, not having to deal with people, puttering in her ruined house and curating her family junk.
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in taped testimony in the first night of hearings, courtesy US House The first of the public hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol aired on multiple platforms tonight.
“Top Gun: Maverick,” the second movie in the now-franchise, broke the Memorial Day weekend record for a movie release and is Tom Cruise’s new “biggest domestic box-office debut,” earning $550 million globally in only a week. Somewhere there are admirals celebrating the range of their wingmen.
Still from ‘Babushkas,’ Chicken and Egg Pictures The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary produced and directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, which emerged from Morris’ earlier journalism and TED Talk about elderly women living in the shadow of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant.
‘Becoming Cousteau,’ National Geographic Documentary Films National Geographic’s Becoming Cousteau (2021), directed and produced by Liz Garbus, is an interesting and timely feature-length biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. (The Odyssey, a 2016 film, was a biopic on his life, based on a nonfiction book.) Becoming is not…
Header from the group’s Facebook page Think of how frantic you would be if you discovered your child had swallowed part of a mushroom they found at the playground. Or what if you caught your cat eating a new houseplant, or your dog ran through a bed of…
Typesetting machines, courtesy Printhusiast, CC 4.0 Some technologies seem to be more aggressive than others in changing their times. Automatic transmissions, for instance, are ubiquitous but fairly inconsequential; they did not significantly change the experience of driving, and I can still choose to drive a stick if I…
“Sympathy” in narrative usually means something more like “complex interest” than “pity.” The goal is (often but not always) to make characters as human as possible, within constraints of form, so audiences will find them meaningful. This requires treating characters with respect, at least to the point of trying to understand them, even if they are crooks, sadists, torturers, murderers, or Nazis. But if a narrative dramatizes very well, it risks justifying bad people or making us feel we “understand” or “identify with” them. This too is sometimes called “sympathy”—though it is more like empathy—for the devil.
Photo by John Griswold Yesterday was national Independent Bookstore Day, which the Boston Globe says was first “put on by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association” in 2014. I did not know there was such a promotional event until it was over, but anything that helps preserve…
Screenshot from Dumas’ show, YouTube Cooking shows are a busman’s holiday for me, given I have always done the cooking in the family. Over the decades one of my recreations has been watching Jacques, Julia, the Two Fat Ladies, Keith Floyd, and others, including Bourdain, who…
Lewis Hine, child coal miners, West Virginia, 1908. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Records of the National Child Labor Committee One of my grandfather’s first jobs was child coal miner, family lore says. My other grandfather, also born in the 1880s, would have labored on the…