PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture Remembering Regis Philbin’s ‘Bonkos’ time on ‘Seinfeld’
“I will never forget that silence, nor will I ever get over it,” Regis Philbin wrote in his 2011 memoir “How I Got This Way.” The moment, as Philbin describes it, was gutting. And to think it was all because of a show about nothing. Philbin, a talk show staple who began his on-camera career…
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Culture As Frog and Toad turn 50, a look at their most mortifying story
I recall with distinct mortification Toad’s striped, singlet bathing suit. Like so many early readers, I was in the cubbyholed realm of an elementary school classroom when I first encountered Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” books, the first of which was released 50 years ago this August. Their whimsical bucolic watercolors struck me then (or…
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Culture What’s the best New York Jewish book of all time?
Literary cities are many, but there’s only one New York. Now, philanthropists Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson are acknowledging that fact with a new award for books set in or about the Big Apple, which will come complete with a $50,000 prize. The news of the Gotham Book Prize arrives at a time when the…
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Culture Ukrainian hostage situation ends after president plugs Joaquin Phoenix film
So, who had “gunman releases 13 hostages after the Ukrainian president agrees to endorse an obscure 2005 documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix” on their 2020 bingo card? If you did, congrats. Yesterday morning in Lutsk, a city in Western Ukraine, a 44-year-old man named Maksym Kryvosh fired an automatic weapon before entering a bus and…
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Culture Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Strasbourg 1518’ is a gutting danse macabre for coronavirus
Jonathan Glazer has been quietly refining a filmic feeling of discomfort, isolation and pervasive paranoia for 25 years. But the director’s gifts are so remarkable that he often receives assignments that run counter to the mood he creates: Commercials for jeans, beer and cars and, more fittingly, music videos. The director of the films “Birth”…
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The Schmooze Vogue Arabia posts a map of Israel labelled ‘Palestine’
Earlier this week, Vogue Arabia posted a provocative image to its website and Instagram page, showing a map of Israel festooned with flowers surrounding the Dome of the Rock. But instead of being labeled “Israel,” the map was captioned “Palestine.” View this post on Instagram Globally, the Palestine/Israel conflict is a hot-button, often controversial and…
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Culture Why Dorothy Parker’s ashes were interred at the NAACP headquarters
When it came to Dorothy Parker’s ashes, she left no instructions, save an epigrammatic epitaph: “Excuse my dust.” But in 1988, over 20 years after her death at 73 from a heart attack (following four suicide attempts), the remains of the rapier-witted New York writer who spent so much of her life changing residences, found…
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Culture In 1960, Clifford Odets wrote his final film — for Elvis
Editor’s Note: Clifford Odets was born on this day in 1906. To commemorate that date, we return to the odd story of how the playwright found himself writing a screenplay for Elvis Presley. Wise men say only fools rush in to a vanity film project for a singer of limited acting ability. That didn’t stop…
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