Harriet

Jane Curtin and Harriet Sansom Harris are best known in the UK for their roles in big 1990s sitcoms. Curtin was Mary Albright, sceptical professor and the object of John Lithgow’s affections in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Harris played Bebe Glazer, Frasier’s purringly machiavellian agent.In the US, both are comedy veterans. Curtin, now 76, began in the first seasons of Saturday Night Live, then won back-to-back Emmys for divorcee double act Kate & Allie. Harris, 68, has had stints on Desperate Housewives and Hacks, but…

As a child, Harriet Gibsone would spend hours sitting with a friend on the roof of a rotting wooden playhouse, staring into the front room of an elderly couple who lived over the fence. This illicit hobby was an oddly mesmerising exercise in anthropology. It was also an early manifestation of what she dubs her “inherent lurk-mode compulsion”, an urge that morphs into a full-blown addiction in adulthood, thanks to the internet and its opportunities for snooping.Her eye-wateringly honest and all-too-relatable memoir takes…

Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of…

Everyone’s favorite clones of famous historical figures have just about thawed out after 20 years on ice and they are... incredibly horny. That’s one of the major takeaways from the latest trailer for Clone High, a modern reboot of the Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Bill Lawrence-created series that originally ran from 2002-2003. Watch Chris Pratt and the Guardians of the Galaxy Cast Open Their Own ToysIn that time, Lord and Miller have gone on to direct and produce some memorable movies, including Spider-Man: Into the…

American money is unbeautiful—uniquely so. One is confronted with this fact at the currency-exchange counters at airports, where one’s workaday green stack of bills is traded for a pile of paper art. The design differences between the dollar and the euro, the dollar and the Ghanaian cedi, and the dollar and the Brazilian real lie in the use of color and texture, and the style of state-controlled regalia. The Japanese yen is gripping, painterly. The blush-toned Tanzanian shilling shows houses of government against blooming…