Do The Movies Have A Future?
“Is the theater really dead?” asked Simon & Garfunkel once upon a time. Forty-five years later, and at the height of the movies’ annual silly season, one might well ask the...
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Now and Then: Time in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
Prefatory note: strongly recommend you watch Boyhood without seeing the trailer or doing a Google Image search or anything like that. Probably don’t read this yet either. But the bottom line...
read moreSix Degrees of Reparation: John Paul Stevens Amends the US Constitution
Constitutional law has always been a game of semantics. So it’s a pleasure to discover that former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We...
read moreFalling For Perfection
The curtain rose on a raucous final edition of the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural “Seriously Entertaining” series last Monday at City Winery NYC. There were cartoons and Muppets,...
read moreCurtain Call: Falling For Perfection
How far we’ve come. The House of SpeakEasy opened its doors on a snowy January night with a guest list including Uma Thurman, Andy Borowitz and Susan Orlean. Since then, we’ve featured...
read moreElliott Kalan Has To Be Funny Every Day
Do you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? We watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Do you know who Elliott Kalan is? If not, listen up, hotshot, because Elliott is the head writer on The Daily...
read moreInadvertent Joys: The Poetry of Jeffrey McDaniel
In the last twenty years Jeffrey McDaniel has published five collections of poetry: The Endarkenment, The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, Alibi School, and his most recent, Chapel of...
read moreWonder Women: Debora Spar on Feminism, Perfection, and Where To Next
Instead of seizing upon the liberation that had been handed to us, we twisted it somehow into a charge: because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything. And by following...
read moreAdam Rapp: “I don’t think parents take too well to my books…”
Adam Rapp is one of those polymaths you read about. A playwright, novelist, musician, screenwriter, director, basketball player… He’s written a couple dozen plays, including Pulitzer...
read moreBreak On Through (with Greil Marcus)
When I was seventeen I went through a massive Doors phase. I loved the music, of course. But no doubt it was also partly an attraction to the grotesque, doomy romanticism of Jim Morrison, “his...
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