“New Regency has ditched plans to produce Pyongyang, a paranoid thriller starring Steve Carell that was to be set in North Korea. … New Regency is 20% owned by News Corp., parent of 20th Century Fox. The studio had indicated to New Regency that it would not release the project.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Amazon Publishing ‘Suppresses’ Book With Too Many Hyphens
“When they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000-word novel contained that dreaded little line,” says author Graeme Reynolds. “This, apparently, ‘significantly impacts the readability of your book,’ and, as a result, ‘We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.'”
Would People Really Rather Get Electric Shocks Than Be Alone With Their Thoughts? Don’t Be So Sure
“Texting, email, social media – we use these to self-stimulate throughout the day and, for some of us at least, throughout the night as well. So there’s got to be something deeply right in the finding that, in the words of the paper, ‘most people do not enjoy ‘just thinking’ and clearly prefer having something else to do.’ Deeply right, maybe, but there is good reason to doubt some of the findings of the study. Not the data, so much, as the way it gets interpreted.”
Why I Became A Philosophy Journalist (And Why We Need Such A Thing)
Steve Neumann: “I feel I owe a debt to philosophy. It liberated me; it gave me the courage to leave behind the comfort and security of a religious worldview, and provided me with a purpose I will be glad to pursue for the rest of my life. So despite having a demanding day job as a guide dog mobility instructor, I spend much of my free time studying it, working out my own positions and trying to inject it into popular culture so that others can be touched by it the way I was. I’ve become not an academic philosopher, but a sort of hybrid – a philosophy journalist.”
An Old Membership-Only Library Remakes Itself As A Thriving Intellectual Equivalent Of Church
“The [Providence] Athenaeum, a Greek Revival edifice that still gives its solid wooden card catalog pride of place, looks and feels like it belongs in another century. But it has lately become a vital part of 21st-century civic life, thanks to a lively Friday night salon series with discussion topics ranging from the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to the Rhode Island quahog clam industry.”
Virna Lisi, 78, Italian Actress Who Won, Then Fled, Hollywood Stardom
“In the 1960s, like many other female Italian actors of the time, Virna Lisi was tempted to try her luck in Hollywood. However, after films in which her co-stars included Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra, she returned to Europe, where she had painstakingly built up a reputation, particularly in Italy and France. It was in these countries that Lisi … had the opportunities to show her mettle.”
“If They Stop Clapping, Tinker Bell Will Die”: What “The Colbert Report” Taught Us About The Psychology Of American Conservatives
Leslie Savan: “You can’t stick with that kind of truthiness-based character (and play him in public appearances off the show) without some sympathy for him, and even for conservatism itself. Colbert expressed that sympathy by showing that beneath his character’s assertion of omnipotence and certitude, there’s a fragility, one that’s also buried in most of the real-life blowhards and their dittoheads. If they stop clapping, Tinker Bell will die.”
The Colbert Report’s Executive Producer And First Co-Head Writer Remembers
“One of the tricky things about the show, especially early on, was figuring out what the honest point of view of the show was, and then how to communicate that through the character of Stephen’s contrasting point of view. When you’re working very quickly on complicated stories, that can get hard. It always reminded me of driving in reverse. Usually, we knew our destination, but we had to drive there super-fast and backwards.”
Liberace To Return To The Stage As A Hologram
“A simulated version of the late pianist will be resurrected by some of the same people who staged Coachella’s holographic Tupac Shakur, with a debut performance scheduled to take place in Las Vegas.”
Why John Waters Is a National Treasure (By Jerry Saltz)
“No one gets the cross-section of showbiz and fandom like him. In giving us these extraordinarily particular individuals and distinct visages – both psychological and visual – Waters gets you to know in your bones that the more we are part of a vast crowd of people who idolize someone or something, the more alone and special we feel in our idolization.” (includes slide show of Waters’s art)