Wear your favorite painting on your clothes
The Bard in Bhojpuri: How Shakespeare’s storytelling resonates with Indian culture
In case you needed further proof we’re living in the movie “Idiocracy”
Colin Kaepernick has a right to free expression. And so does everyone else.
Gene Wilder, Comedian of Kindness:
In a 2013 interview at the 92nd street Y in New York City, a frail Wilder explained why he did not star in any films in the final two decades of his life. “The swearing, and the, the loud bombing, after a while I said, they were so..they were dirty,” Wilder said, “and once in a while a nice, a good film, but not that many. I don’t mean when I was starting out, but later on. And I said, I don’t know, I don’t want to. If something comes along that is really good, and I think I would be good for it, I’ll be happy to do it, but not too many came along.”
In making that choice, Wilder would leave millions of dollars on the table and millions of fans disappointed that they had seen the last of his comic genius. But comedy had passed him by, and he knew it. Not only because of the tragic death of his beloved wife Gilda Radner, but because society had changed. The clean, pleasant, and kind comedy that he had grown up with and eventually mastered had given way to crass and callous yuks, and that was a style Wilder would never embrace.
In Wilder’s work, in “The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Stir Crazy,” “Willy Wonka,” and others, we find a kind of comedy even more rare today than it was then. It is a comedy of kindness we can show our children, as I showed my brother, that lets us laugh at the best, not the worst, that we are. This was a singular gift, and one we ought to cherish for as long as people keep making us laugh.
I hope you’re sitting down because you won’t believe this but 30 of the “non-work” emails Hillary tried to permanently delete via BleachBit were actually about the Benghazi terror attack.
Edward Short reviews Auden’s collected prose
ISIS’ Amaq News Agency is confirming that spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani is dead. Adnani was far more than the mouthpiece of ISIS. He was head of the Emni, the Secret Service of ISIS which plotted external terror attacks. An AQI/ISIS veteran, he was a member of the original Zarqawi network since 2002.
Italian 18-year-olds to receive €500 “culture bonus”
The true story of Doctor Zhivago‘s Lara
The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright shows a side of the architect you never knew.
Emily Brontë may have had Asperger syndrome, says biographer
There is a vast literature on Wagner. Is it any longer possible to really hear the music?