โจ Check out this must-read post from The New Yorker ๐ ๐ Category: Books / This Week in Fiction ๐ก Key idea: Your story in this week's issue, "Aman," is about two childhood friends, Nicole and Yasmina, whose lives diverge, then converge, then diverge again, and it is set against the backdrop of our increasingly fraught political moment. Did any of these items come to you first?I traveled to Uzbekistan last spring, and before I left I read that Stalin had ordered the evacuation of millions of Soviet citizens to Uzbekistan in the early years of World War II. For…
๐ฅ Check out this awesome post from The New Yorker ๐ ๐ Category: Culture / Postscript โ
Hereโs what youโll learn: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, his 1966 Shakespearean theatrical mystery about third-rate characters grappling with their inexorable fate, and pervasive conversations about probability and comic boredom (โLife is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn't take itโ). He hit the stage like a comet. Even in the alternate reality in which Stoppard only wrote Rosencrantz, we would still be in the hole resulting from that masterpiece. Crucially, it demonstrated the scope and ambition of…
๐ฅ Explore this insightful post from The New Yorker ๐ ๐ Category: Culture / Persons of Interest ๐ Key idea: It takes six to seven hours to build each bowl, using files that flatten them into thick strips. You begin a new series by drawing the shapes you have in mind, although the actual shape always emerges in the construction process; She says that clay is alive and resists its maker. When she moved to Denmark, she realized that the types of vessels she had been making until then did not translate well into the language of high-fired stoneware. She…
๐ฅ Read this insightful post from The New Yorker ๐ ๐ Category: Magazine / Takes โ
Hereโs what youโll learn: On August 9, 1947, The New Yorker He devotes nearly an entire page to one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. โIn the Fish Housesโ by Elizabeth Bishop represents, after the high modernism of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, a break toward a more personal vernacular. It is also a work of imagination, showing how a solitary soul can descend into the heart of life and matter and achieve solace and spiritual insight, however temporary. It confirmed the emergence…
๐ Check out this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Panto season,Stage,Culture,Theatre ๐ Key idea: WWho needs a flying carpet when you're taking the bus to Maypole? The climax of Fraser Boyle's hilarious scene comes when Abanazar (Gavin John Wright) leaks the location of his not-so-secret hideout and goes after the rest of the cast. On public transportation. On the movie. Outside broadcasting has never been so funny.Not that the villain has much of a chance: after stealing the magic lamp and summoning his four genies (in a grand show of community engagement, the cast outnumbers…
๐ฅ Check out this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Musicals,Stage,Culture,Theatre,Watermill theatre,Hans Christian Andersen,Folk music ๐ Main takeaway: CChristmas has gone underwater for 2025, with productions of The Little Mermaid in Nottingham, Hull and Newcastle. This show, at the Watermill, is presented in the theatre's signature actor-musician style, with the text illuminated by cheerful live folk music played on stage. There's even some snow thrown in for a good celebration.The story is transported to Cornwall in this short but sweet adaptation by Elgeva Field and Lara Barbier. Following the basic structure of Hans Christian Andersen's original,…
๐ฅ Discover this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Television,Culture,Television & radio,Sandi Toksvig ๐ Main takeaway: 'toWell at that!! exclaimed a delighted Sandy Toksvig at the start of her exhilarating new journey, the Grand Riviera Railway Journey. "Marseille!" There's no denying that the city of Marseille stands behind it, the starting point for a four-loop journey east along the southern French coast that will include picturesque fishing villages, luxury resorts and exotic corners.Shows where we watch celebrities go on vacation come in many different stripes, but it all boils down to pressing our noses to the…
โจ Discover this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Fiction,Books,Vladimir Nabokov,Culture,Fiction in translation,Romania,Communism ๐ก Main takeaway: IIn 2014, while traveling around the United States on a book tour, Mircea Certarescu was able to fulfill a lifelong dream: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov's Butterfly Collection. An ardent admirer of the Russian-American author, Kirtarescu shares a literary career that bridges Western and Eastern cultural spheres โ as well as a history in which he was touted as a laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature but never won it.Above all, it shares the Roman poet and novelist Nabokov's…
๐ฅ Check out this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Architecture,Film,Milton Keynes,UK news,Culture,Art and design,Buildings at risk,Heritage ๐ก Hereโs what youโll learn: Forty years ago this month, British cinema was changed forever with the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes, the first American-style multiplex cinema in the UK. Looming over Midsummer Boulevard, the Point Hotel's mirrored glass ziggurat and red pyramid frame boldly combine Mayan and Egyptian motifs in a high-tech, futuristic temple of pleasure. In addition to 10 screens (which opened for Back to the Future, The Goonies, and My Beautiful Laundrette routines), there…
โจ Discover this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian ๐ ๐ Category: Panto season,Theatre,Stage,Culture,Theatre Royal Stratford East ๐ Main takeaway: eLon Musk as a pantomime villain? This is the scene with which we are all familiar. But a panto villain like Elon Musk? This is perhaps the first of its kind in Vicky Stone and Tondray Monivu's Christmas show, which doesn't stop at satirical asides - nor, I'm happy to report, raucous festive fun. Musk is shown scaring our three heroes when they hijack a SpaceX rocket to rescue Gary the Goose from interstellar captivity (for some reason). Previously…
