enduring

From the first time I heard about The Holdovers, I knew that Alexander Payne reteaming with Paul Giamatti for the first time in 20 years was going to be one of the best movies of 2023. And I was right. Like several of my colleagues who couldn’t get enough of the Oscar-nominated film about a teacher, a student, and a school cook reluctantly spending the holidays together, I was floored by the humor, drama, and overall superb emotional tone of the touching dramedy.Though Giamatti and newcomer Dominic Sessa, who played Paul…

An old Hollywood adage warns novice directors away from working with children, animals or water; a worthy addition to this list would be food, an equally uncooperative quantity in the film-making process.It’s easy enough to gussy up a roast chicken with hairspray for that perfectly basted sheen, or to blow cigarette smoke over it as a dupe for steam straight from the oven. But to portray the action of cooking, as the Cannes prize-winner Trần Anh Hùng does in the bravura opening scene of his new film The Taste of Things,…

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Coast redwoods – enormous, spectacular trees, some reaching nearly 400 feet, the tallest plants on the planet – thrive mostly in a narrow strip of land in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Most of them grow from southern Oregon down into northern California, snugged up against the rugged Pacific coast.They have grown by slowly responding to moisture and rich alluvial soil over millennia,…

I am haunted by mulch posts.  The most recent mulch video came to me in the middle of the night, when I was hours into scrolling through a particularly nasty bout of insomnia. The video was an edit of a tiny dog surrounded by a frame of glittering hearts, with an AI-generated voice narrating, “Today, I soilmaxxed to the highest potential. I am full of loam, asbestos and red 40.” Mulch posts have periodically appeared in my restless nights for months. In the hours that I know I should be sleeping, I am hounded by…

Writing during the period of the Harlem renaissance in 1940, Langston Hughes reflects the times: Landlord, landlordMy roof has sprung a leak.Don’t you ’member I told you about itWay last week? Hughes’ thrillingly lyrical reportage in one of my favourite poems, The Ballad of the Landlord, is a familiar gripe about, among other things, the disrepair that plagues thousands of tenants.He reminds us of what we already know: the rent is too damn high. In Britain, the leaks have been sprung, the rents are the highest on record,…

Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky have successfully navigated the challenges of parenthood while keeping their love strong. Despite raising three children – daughter India, 11, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, 9 – the couple's relationship has endured. Spanish actress Elsa Pataky (L) and her husband Australian actor Chris Hemsworth pose for photographers on the red carpet as they arrive for the premiere of the Netflix movie 'Tyler Rake: Extraction 2' in Berlin on June 9, 2023. (Photo by John MACDOUGALL / AFP)(AFP)…

I read my first Agatha Christie a little late in life. In college, at a time when the internet was the preserve of a select few, books had to be bought in stores, and thrifting wasn’t a concept, I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of The ABC Murders at a ramshackle library that my cousin and I frequented every summer. Emerging only later that night, I set the book aside as the best thing I had ever read. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair. PREMIUM Just the sort of lovely home in a quiet English village…

A front page story in The New York Times on July 2, 1971, with details about the conflict in Congress over the CBS documentary ‘The Selling of the Pentagon.’ Credit: New York Times archive Everyone seems to hate what they call "the media." Attacking journalism—even accurate and verified reporting—provides a quick lift for…

This is the digital age, and the advice to executives is clear. Managers need to have a digital mindset;…

It’s that backdrop of cases—rising to historic heights with no clear explanation why—that reinforces the alarm over scarlet fever now. The World Health Organization said last week that the health ministries of France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK have all reported further spikes in cases. On the same day, the UK Health Security Agency said the current cases are three times what they were at the same point during the 2017-18 spike. British news is full of reports of huge local case counts—35 times the…