Kyle Buchanan: “I met with Scott recently in Beverly Hills to discuss how he did it, and what I found was a filmmaker who has the stamina of a man half his age and an octogenarian’s give-no-fucks bluntness.”
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The Least Powerful People In The Art World
Every year the list of most powerful in the art world is read with interest. But who are the least powerful?
Colonial America’s Most Notorious Poet Was An Enslaved Teenage Girl
Phyllis Wheatley was abducted from the West African coast and sold to a Boston couple at roughly age seven. Their daughter taught the young slave to read, and within two years, Phyllis fluently read and wrote English and started learning Latin. When she was 18, her owners took her to London to publish a book of her poems, and – once disbelieving publishers and others were convinced that Phyllis had written them herself – she became famous on both sides of the Atlantic.
When People Claim They’re Defending Against A ‘War On Christmas’, What Exactly Is It They’re Fighting For?
Adam Gopnik: “Christmas has always been a happily mixed-up holiday for mixed-up people and confused cultures. It is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular-synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one – just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favor.”
As Broadway Has Become More About Tourists, Musicals Have Crowded Out Plays
For decades, the theaters of Broadway — now numbering 41 — were the moneymaking breeding ground for these plays. But what was once the rule on Broadway is now the rare exception. And the traditional for-profit, new Broadway play is disappearing almost as surely as the dodo.
How Airline Safety Videos Evolved From Boring Instructionals Into Comic Extravaganzas
It all started with Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic (“make flying fun again”), which used hand-drawn cartoons. “In the ensuing years, airlines have pulled out nearly every gimmick imaginable to make their safety video a YouTube sensation. A Qatar Airlines video takes place at an FC Barcelona match, an El Al video takes the form of a cringeworthy Devo tribute, and … even sedate, legacy brands like British Airways, Singapore Airlines, United, and Air France have succumbed to the trend in recent years, with tasteful videos that offer their own unique spin on the genre.” Then there’s the undisputed champion, Air New Zealand …
Nightmare First Date Ends With $1 Million Worth Of Art Destroyed In Drunken Rampage
Texas attorney Anthony Buzbee probably thought his evening was going well when he brought 29-year-old blonde Lindy Lou Layman to his $14 million mansion. But she got overly inebriated, and when he tried to send her home in an Uber, she hurled two sculptures across the room, ripped three paintings – including two original Warhols – off the wall, and poured some as-yet-unidentified liquid on them.
How Spalding Gray Became An Actual Paint Color
Reporter Judith Newman recounts a story that takes in the late monologuist, a Cleveland architect, his Weimaraner, his clients, Sherwin Williams, and, in the end, Gray’s widow and old house.
You Can Now Read The Editor’s Savage Notes On Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cancelled Book
Thanks to Milo’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against Simon & Schuster for withdrawing publication of his book Dangerous, the draft manuscript with comments by editor Mitchell Ivers is now public record. So the Internet is having a high old time with it, and you can join in. (Our personal favorite note: “Beauty regime moved to box at end of chapter, after Nietzsche section.”)
‘We Should Do Nothing’: An Archaeologist Argues Against Rebuilding Palmyra
In an extensive Q&A that also covers the history of the ancient Syrian city, its destruction by ISIS, the lack of an international or UN intervention to save it, and the trade in looted antiquities, Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, an archaeologist who worked at Palmyra for three decades, makes his case for what the West should and shouldn’t do at the site now that the shooting there is over.