Norman Cook can remember the first time he met James Hamilton very clearly. “He was enormous,” he laughs. “Enormous and very well-spoken, called everyone ‘dear boy’, quite camp. He looked so … unlikely. Not a party animal, not into anything apart from dance music and the vibe and the culture of it all. Not interested … Read more
I feel that Athol Fugard and his wife, Paula Fourie, changed my life in the autumn of 2022 when I visited South Africa to spend time with them and their daughter Halle. We were supposed to be working on a book together, and we did; but our time became so much more than that. There … Read more
Ruth Marcus, a columnist and editor for The Washington Post’s opinion section, said she was leaving the newspaper after Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher, killed a column she wrote that was critical of the editorial pages’ new direction. Ms. Marcus announced her resignation in an email to her colleagues at The Post, saying she had … Read more
As powerful storms swept across Central Florida on Monday morning, an Orlando television station’s weather camera captured a tornado hitting the station. “Take shelter!” a Fox 35 morning meteorologist, Brooks Garner, shouted on the air, warning co-workers to get under their desks — the designated safe spaces for such occurrences. He had been delivering updates … Read more
Another month, another revolutionary generative AI development that will apparently fundamentally alter how an entire industry operates. This time tech giant Microsoft has created a “gameplay ideation” tool, Muse, which it calls the world’s first Wham, or World and Human Action Model. Microsoft claims that Muse will speed up the lengthy and expensive process of … Read more
Amazon is deepening its relationship with President Trump. Amazon Prime Video announced on Monday that multiple seasons of “The Apprentice,” the 2000s reality series that helped raise Mr. Trump’s profile on a national stage, would soon be available on the streaming service. The show’s first season, which premiered in 2004, is available on Prime Video … Read more
Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? And if you don’t go to a gallery, maybe you’ll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening … Read more
For years, dual roles have been played largely for laughs. Think of Adam Sandler’s Razzie-sweeping twin turn in Jack and Jill, or Lisa Kudrow as both Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on Friends. Eddie Murphy was always particularly prolific, his most multiplicitous performance as a clutch of Klumps for Nutty Professor II. There are exceptions, of … Read more
At the centre of most things is a skeleton. So it is for the online infamy of Joyce Carol Oates. In 2021, the award-winning novelist delivered her most significant contribution to literature: a diabolical tweet ruminating on the existentialism of Halloween. (you can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or … Read more
When Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings … Read more