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Propwatch: the stuffed duck in ‘Rutherford & Son’

There’s barely a scrap of frivolity in the Rutherford home. The seat of a Tyneside manufacturing family in the 1910s, it’s imposing, substantial, stuffed to the gunwales with heavy furniture – yet you struggle to spot anything that isn’t grimly functional or solid enough to break your toe should you drop it. Whatever else it is, the house of Rutherford is not a house of fun. – David Jays

Was 1999 The Best Year Ever For Movies?

Brian Raftery makes a persuasive, entertaining case for the enduring impact of a passel of classics, from “American Beauty” to “American Movie” to “American Pie.” Among them: “The Matrix,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Three Kings,” “Being John Malkovich,” “The Best Man,” “The Insider,” “The Virgin Suicides,” “Magnolia” and “Election.” – The New York Times

Classic Fiction Is Confessional – Tell Your Secrets. But In The Social Media Age…

…what if the opposite is true? That your secrets, the things only you know about yourself, are in fact the most trivial, most banal things about you? In a society where many of us who don’t qualify as public figures spend a lot of time projecting our lives and our personalities in public, the biggest secret of all might be that, in whatever privacy we have left, we don’t have any secrets. – Book Forum