There was a time, 20 or so years ago, when it seemed as if TV music supervisors were among the most important people when it came to shaping public tastes. There were, as yet, no video or music streaming services, so music featured in a hit show could blow up as a result. One music … Read more
On Monday, ABC said the Oscars audience declined by about 8 percent this year compared with last year, citing Nielsen data. Well, it turns out the awards show did not suffer from an audience decline after all, the network said on Tuesday. The Academy Awards attracted 19.7 million viewers, strong enough to eclipse last year’s … Read more
Pensioners take their evening stroll on an elevated walkway, surrounded by lush thickets of bamboo, as a game of five-a-side football kicks off on a sunken pitch below. Around them, forming a huge C-shaped courtyard, rises a five-storey stack of streets in the sky, where signs advertise everything from yoga and dance studios to skincare … Read more
Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who in exacting detail explored the Mafia’s many tentacles, and whose doggedness helped lead to the exoneration of men wrongly convicted of notorious 1960s killings, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90. His son-in-law, Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter, said … Read more
In 2019, the Yale historian David Blight won a Pulitzer prize, for his monumental biography of Frederick Douglass. In 2020, Blight was beginning work on his next book, about the life of the writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson. Then, his college president called. “Peter Salovey called me up, in the depths of … Read more
One of the oldest indie labels in Britain sits down a muddy lane on an old RAF site, less than a mile from the sea, half an hour from the mountains of Eryri. Founded in 1969, Sain – meaning sound in Welsh, pronounced (in English) like “sign” – is an unusual label, host to a … Read more
Bianca Raffaella is showing me the huge canvases she has painted for her debut solo show Faint Memories when a strange realisation hits me. I can see these beautiful depictions of petals and stems in their full, widescreen splendour – and she can’t. The 32-year-old was born with congenital toxoplasmosis and is registered blind: her … Read more
Unless it becomes a ratings smash (and that isn’t impossible), With Love, Meghan doesn’t just represent the hard launch of Duchess of Sussex’s new career as a Martha Stewart-style lifestyle inspo guru; it might also be the final thing she makes for Netflix. The terms of the deal Harry and Meghan signed with the streamer … Read more
In 1992, Jack Vettriano’s painting The Singing Butler was rejected by the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Anyone who has seen some of the dross picked for display in the RA’s annual open submission collision of amateur artists and big stars in recent decades will be thinking: “Ouch, must’ve been a real dud.” But The Singing … Read more
In the summer of 1985, I made the long pilgrimage from my home in Cheadle Hulme to London’s glamorous Hammersmith Novotel for the Commodore computer show. As a 14-year-old gamer, this was a chance to play the latest titles and see some cool new joysticks, but I was also desperate to visit one particular exhibitor: … Read more