But whew, the discourse. For instance, Emma Thompson isn't "brave" for acting in sex scenes; she’s "an actress who’s still at the top of her game, performing brilliantly and telling a story that isn’t often told. So there are small steps." - The Guardian (UK)
In To the Lighthouse, "these dishes are described with great fanfare but, as any competent home cook will know, beef stews are neither challenging to make nor impressive to look at. ... They do not require, as Woolf’s depiction would have it, a series of complicated steps." - The Paris Review
For decades, the early 20th century fiction written by Yiddish women was "dismissed by publishers as insignificant or unmarketable to a wider audience." Luckily, "there has been a surge of translations of female writers by Yiddish scholars devoted to keeping the literature alive." - The New York Times
It's climate change, dummy: "Activist artists are working to get humanity to change course before it’s too late. They are sculpting major artworks that highlight the serious environmental crises facing local water bodies, while at the same time providing new habitats for aquatic life." - MacLean's (Canada)
"New narrative booms. Its dissociative forms and themes — the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in-ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex — now serve a community of passion addicts, haunted memoirists, and mental thrill-riders hungering for a higher high." - Los Angeles Review of Books
As Music Man showed, you shut down for days; keep paying everyone; and hire great swings. "We had swings covering seven roles and trying to hold up that show. And they did." One swing "is 10 years old, and she was covering three tracks." - The New York Times
While rejecting the sometimes arid 12-tone technique of Modernists, Mr. Crumb beguiled audiences with his own musical language, composing colorful and concise works that range in mood from peaceful to nightmarish. - The New York Times
The Oscars maintain a "strange aura ... as a gold standard of cinematic achievement: For several months a year, people fret and discuss and strategise about them, while companies expensively campaign for them, only to spend the rest of the year complaining that they don’t mean anything." - The Observer (UK)
Yes, partly because the film absolutely bombed at the box office. "Wonder Boys succeeds. It succeeds because it failed, and because at heart it’s about failure. And writers are connoisseurs of failure." - LitHub
"Spotify has a responsibility for what it’s amplifying. Does that mean that it has the only responsibility? Does that let the producer, the content creator off the hook? No. Does it let the audience off the hook for their need to engage in critical thinking, critical listening?" - Slate
Sure, "we like stories about education that feel true" - but this one simply isn't. And keep in mind that "those who want us to forget (or mis-remember) the past are very much committed to our giving up hope." - Hack Education
"For a few days this week, a new firm called HitPiece sold nonfungible tokens, or NFTs — pieces of code asserting ownership over a digital object — associated with thousands of musicians’ catalogs" - and, it seems, without permission. - Los Angeles Times
Epstein was the editor of Philip Roth, Jane Jacobs, and W.H. Auden; one of the founders of The New York Review of Books; and the masterful pusher of the trade paperback. "His major publishing achievements owed much to an uncommon mix of literary and marketing instincts." - The New York Times
