Recently I saw a brilliantly chilling local production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. This musical, which grants the stage to the men and women who have attempted and, in four instances, succeeded in assassinating the President of the United States, is usually modified by the word “controversial.”.The show’s inaugural run in 1990-91 lost momentum amid surging…
A three-week-old tweet about Taylor Swift’s supposedly giant vagina by Jennifer Mayers, a Baton Rouge woman describing herself as Christian Trump supporter, received fresh traction yesterday. The tweet is probably a joke — targeting the outlandish misogyny of Donald Trump and (in some people’s minds) evangelical Christianity — but it comes off because most people, even…
Call him Michael Bergin. In a video that went viral earlier this week after he posted it to his Facebook page, a Massachusetts man and his friend—the relatively silent Jay—encounter Leviathan in the waters off Boston. Lolling on the surface of the water, an immense, disc-shaped creature with fins pitched and flapped. “Holy shit what…
Avidly is very avid about beloved cultural objects — movies and musicals among them. In anticipation of the new movie version of Into the Woods, due in theaters December 25, we asked one of our most beloved families of Sondheim fanatics, the Blum Eburnes, to give us their thoughts. Reporting that they “live in jaundiced anticipation” of…
The news out of Antarctica this week is terrible. You might assume that I refer to this week’s report of the looming, irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet that will produce a 10+ foot rise in sea levels in the next 100 years — but that is so terrible as not to qualify…
The polar explorer Felicity Aston is the first woman to traverse Antarctica solo and the first human to do so under her own muscle alone. I met her recently at an event hosted by my university’s Polar Center. In her riveting presentation, drawn from her book Alone in Antarctica (which you must read, and not only because it…
Recently Rolling Stone published a list of the 100 greatest Bruce Springsteen songs of all time as decided by a panel of Rolling Stone judges. Predictably “Born to Run” nabbed the first spot, and predictably, some folks in my earshot complained that Rolling Stone’s panel seemed a little bit white and a little bit male….
I grew up in the North Jersey precincts of Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, but the literary home of my youth was in the West. My family traveled by motorhome throughout my childhood and I spent most of my summers reading westerns in situ. In the summer of 1985, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove was published…