Publishers started courting him, hard, as soon as he was fired by the current president, and especially after he leaked some memos. “Comey was reluctant at first to entertain offers, but he later decided that he had something to say beyond a rehashing of his career highlights and low points, according to his agent.”
Blog
Turkey Has Fired 7,000 More Civil Servants, Academics, And Even Police
“The announcement comes a day before the one-year anniversary of a failed coup against the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the wake of the coup, around 150,000 officials have been dismissed from their posts and more than 50,000 people have been jailed.”
Confronting The Past Through Pop-Up Refugee Art
“Surprised that the tour guide was also a painter, Saskia Leefsma, one of the visitors in the group, asked, ‘Do you have a studio now?’ Mr. Mukasa admitted that no, this was the very first painting he’d made in a very long while because he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Let’s Discuss The Sheer Genius Of Hamilton’s Music (No, Not The Lyrics – The Music)
Shut up, critics who can’t stop talking about how rap isn’t music. “Since rap’s natural language is the repeated loop, the critique of it can’t be that it uses inert repeated loops. We actually have to accept the loop as a given and to dig deeper to see if those loops are malleable enough for the artist to create thematic meaning. Miranda does not disappoint. Listening to the cast album reveals an entire world of sonic meaning.”
Martin Landau, Who Won An Oscar For Playing Bela Lugosi, Dies At 89
Of course, Landau also starred as Rollin Hand for several years in the original Mission: Impossible and the heroic villain of Crimes and Misdemeanors.
It’s Really Hard For People (Mostly, But Not All, Male) To Let Women Just Read
At least, it’s hard in the United States. In France, no such problem. “If you sit for many hours and look down at a book and then up at a city and then down at the book again, eventually the two blend into one, and there is no longer any difference between them. This is how the collapse between literature and life happens.”
For Syrian Actors, An Intensely Lengthy, Challenging Road To The United States
For a play running at the Lincoln Center, actors and designers converged on New York from six different countris. “Under most circumstances, obtaining a United States visa is arduous. In the case of these visiting artists, the ordeal involved proving that they had a good reason to enter the United States, that they were not a security threat and that they had no intention of staying in the country. The Trump administration’s travel ban — and the legal turmoil around it — has made the whole process all the more bewildering.”
China’s Artists Defy Ban To Mourn Liu Xiaobo
Praying hands and candle emojis were banned from Weibo, but artists found creative ways to post. “Some posted the works of Liu Xiaobo’s poet and artist widow Liu Xia, who remains under house arrest, depicting mutilated dolls positioned in bleak landscapes. Paintings of empty chairs referenced the empty seat at Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Chinese government refused to release him to receive.”
What We Expect From Films Affects How We See Them, Says A Critic
Katie Walsh: “When studios drive a wedge between the two groups, claiming certain blockbusters are for ‘fans, not critics,’ it’s drawing a divide that shouldn’t exist. Ultimately, critics are fans. We want to like movies and we want them to be good. Just think of us as your helpful neighborhood expectation managers.”
George A. Romero, The Man Who Made ‘Night Of The Living Dead,’ Has Died At 77
The man who jump-started the modern zombie era didn’t like The Walking Dead and some other new zombie projects, even while he continued working in the genre (and in other genres). He once said of newer zombies, “They’re just dervishes, you don’t recognize any of them, there’s nothing to characterize them. … [But]I like to give even incidental zombies a bit of identification. I just think it’s a nice reminder that they’re us. They walked out of one life and into this.”