admin
-
The Business Trip
In the film, a father’s arrest is disguised from his young son as a “business trip.” In my own family, the euphemism wasn’t far off — an uncle who told the wrong joke simply vanished from Belgrade, and turned up months later on Goli Otok, a barren island where Tito’s regime sent its “enemies” to…
-
A Tunnel Through the Black Death
A haunting medieval odyssey carries villagers from the Black Death into a modern world they could never have imagined.
-
50 Beatles Covers You Need to Hear Now
Fifty Beatles songs, fifty unexpected interpretations—from soul and punk to jazz, power pop, and everything in between.
-
He Didn’t Even Know What Grant Looked Like
When Robert E. Lee rode up to Appomattox Courthouse to surrender, he didn’t even know what Ulysses S. Grant looked like. Grant recognized him instantly. What happened between them that day was generous, almost gentle — and Grant himself would later write that he felt anything but triumph watching the South go down.
-
The Man Who Might Be Jim
Twain didn’t write the hardest word in American literature by accident — leaving it out would have been like leaving water out of a description of the Pacific Ocean. But the more surprising story is the one behind Jim: a real friendship, thirty years long, with a Black farmer named John T. Lewis who may…
-
It Came Out Of Liverpool: The Wit and Wisdom of the Beatles
Liverpool ran on wit the way other port towns ran on rum — a hard, dead-end place where you were judged by how sharp your comeback was. The Beatles were born into that culture, and long before their songwriting caught up to their ambition, it was their jokes — riffing off each other like veteran…
-
Star-Crossed
Nearly every great Frank Capra film was really a two-man act — Capra’s ideas, Riskin’s words, a partnership as gifted as Lennon and McCartney’s and, in the end, just as doomed. What broke it wasn’t politics, even though the two men stood on opposite sides of it. It was ego — and by the time…
-
Drip, Baby, Drip: Jackson Pollack and the Paint Machine
In the old comedy “What a Way to Go!,” every man Shirley MacLaine marries strikes it rich by some freak chance, then dies, leaving her alone again. One of them, played by Paul Newman, is a painter with a machine that splatters canvases in time to music — a joke that isn’t as far from…