You might have heard about sprezzatura. Baldassare Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier, defined it as “a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.” That was 1528. You might have read about it more recently in the New Yorker, […]
Over the past twenty years or so, the Costume Institute’s annual Met Ball has exploded from in-crowd cause célèbre to the Oscars of fashion. The benefit began in 1948 as a slightly cheeky fundraiser popular among the Capote’s Swans set. But decades of careful marketing from the gala’s co-sponsor ( Vogue, via Diana Vreeland and […]
ONE OF MY MORE popular tweets fits squarely into the Bad Dad Joke genre. An image from Dr. Seuss‘s book sees a father sitting in a chair, a glum look on his face. His three children discuss their father’s plight in that familiar singsong cadence: “Dad is sad. Very, very sad. He had a bad […]
I thought it would be easy to compile a list of books where women live alone. And it was, but what is considerably less easy is to think about books where women live alone and don’t fall into, or emerge from a completely deranged state. I asked friends, and one replied, “the first thing that […]
Photo by the Museum of New Zealand, common creatives via Unsplash I thought it would be easy to compile a list of books where women live alone. And it was, but what is considerably less easy it to think about books where women live alone and don’t fall into, or emerge from, a completely deranged […]
My father was born and raised in Norway, and I’ve spoken the language since living there for seven months when I was 12. In 2003, while visiting family in Oslo, my Dad’s cousin and her husband (who I consider my aunt and uncle) introduced me to the work of Jon Fosse. I read Fosse’s play […]
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon AT 20, WRITER Suzanne Scanlon checked herself into the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The ward, her home for the next three years, was a living relic of the midcentury golden age of long-term inpatient psychiatric care. Dorms and common spaces radiated outward from a panopticon-like nurses’ […]
“My body is a prison,” Steve Gleason writes. “I face insurmountable adversity every day, yet my family and I are able to survive and live within this miraculous, wonderful life.” A LIFE IMPOSSIBLE: Living With ALS: Finding Peace and Wisdom Within a Fragile Existence, by Steve Gleason with Jeff Duncan After you turn 70, as […]
Conceived as a modern day Elizabeth Bennet — or at least, another woman in love with an emotionally unavailable man — Bridget Jones made a massive splash when she hit the shelves in 1996. Her diary, written by Helen Fielding and alternately derided and praised for its depiction of a neurotic, happy-go-nutty modern “singleton,” sold […]
I don’t usually include personal anecdotes in film reviews, lest they detract from the critical discussion at hand, but I’d just like to open this review by saying that I brought my 87-year-old Croatian grandmother with me to my advance screening of The Fall Guy in IMAX, and after we got her situated in her […]
