It was with some trepidation that I went to watch The Danish Girl. Prior to its release the film had already attracted accusations of transphobia for director Tom Hooper’s decision to cast the cisgender actor Eddie Redmayne in the title role of Lili Elbe, a trans woman.
Auld Lang Syne was famously written by the Scottish national bard, Robert Burns. What is less well known is that the melody was not the one he intended. The one that became famous was first attached to the song in the late 1790s and Burns, who died in 1796, knew nothing about it.
A man winds his way through the muck and mire of a 19th-century American port – Nantucket, centre of the world’s whaling industry. He knocks on a door, enters, and begs an exhausted looking man to tell him his story in exchange for his life savings.
Christmas has become a cultural event, associated with the giving of gifts and lavish meals with friends and family. But the traditional understanding of Christmas is that it’s a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus.
Indeed, the past year saw audiences becoming more and more amenable to adopting new ways to watch TV shows, with live audiences for broadcast and cable programs declining sharply.
Intellectuals, academics and artists play a unique role in society: they preserve and defend both freedom of expression and the morality of choices. Artists can use their work as a means to communicate messages of dissent and hope in the face of injustice, repression and despair.
In certain corners of the internet a modern myth celebrates the idea that Ben Rich, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin “Skunk Works” – the legendary and highly secretive wing of Lockheed Martin concerned with aircraft development – concluded a 1993 presentation at UCLA with the blockbuster line: “We now have the technology to take E.T. home.”
Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on December 12 is being celebrated with all the requisite fanfare: Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, CBS' Sinatra 100 All-Star Grammy Concert, exhibits at the Lincoln Center and Grammy Museum, a London Palladium show and a number of book publications.
- By Jane Messer
Bad sex. Isn’t it enough to have had it without having to read it as well? A poorly written sex scene can be viscerally dreadful. While porn is fundamentally unrealistic, bad sex in prose that’s not explicit can be excruciating.
A film adaptation of the celebrated Scottish novel Sunset Song is arriving at a time of recurrent European financial crises and a war in the Middle East that is sucking in many of the world’s major powers for the second time in a generation.
Most people think of rest as the times when we stop work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength. But historians and anthropologists have discovered that what counts as rest has varied a lot over time and across cultures.
An insistent clamour of bells and horns recurs throughout Carol, evoking the stifling, heavy atmosphere of conformity that overlay early 1950s America. An older woman, the wealthy, strikingly beautiful Carol (Cate Blanchett), starts an affair with young salesgirl and aspiring photographer, Therese (Rooney Mara).
In the past 150 years Lewis Carroll’s Alice has undergone innumerable transformations. Instantly popular, she quickly escaped her original novelistic environment, appearing in Victorian Punch caricatures, on magic lantern slides and on stage.
We’re exposed to music for nearly 20% of our waking lives. But much of our musical experience seems to be a mystery. Why does some music bring us to tears while other pieces make us dance? Why is it that the music that we like can make others agitated?
My mission in this article is to share with you what I’ve learned and observed as a longtime coach of graduate students and writer of creative projects. Here are some techniques, tools, and tough questions to ease the trek for yourself and everyone around you...
- By Richard Bach
At first, deciding about television was a simple matter of thoughtful grading. A slow matter, too, as I had been watching television for all these days and never thought of grading it. How I grade: Every news event in a half-hour newscast, would earn a grade from me, its viewer.
Are we not more important than our cell phones? Our “batteries” run low as well. Few people are as urgent to charge their own batteries as they are to charge up their cell phone. We push and push ourselves to keep going and we don’t pay attention to our own battery or need to be recharged.
I found the film Suffragette utterly stirring. This came as something of a surprise to me. The voluminous press coverage has been unanimous: the film’s uniqueness lies in its focus on working class women’s struggle for the vote.
- By Nora Caron
Within ourselves we contain seeds of great creativity. We are usually afraid of our own powers so we like to distract ourselves with hundreds of little mundane things rather than look in the mirror and see our real selves. Modern society encourages us to get lost in the world of social media where others are praised for their creativity and we hide in their shadows...
- By Judy Reeves
“No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.” [Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves.] Something about the way those two words — wild and woman — were placed alongside each other set up a commotion inside me, a response to a longing I couldn’t name.
Psychologists have advanced a new theory linking neurotic unhappiness and creativity, arguing that natural worriers may also have highly active imaginations and be more creative problem-solvers.
The provenance of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is perhaps less well known than the novel itself, which has come to be even less remarked upon than the legal travails and self-imposed isolation of the author who penned the work.
Our happiness depends on whether we believe something is good or bad. But most people are not aware of this important mechanism and they believe that it is outer circumstances and what they have or don’t have in their lives, which is the reason why they are happy or unhappy.