
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Midway through Asghar Farhadi’s “The Salesman,” Emad, the actor and schoolteacher who serves as the Oscar-nominated film’s protagonist, seizes one of his student’s phones, hoping to delete photos the student has taken of him sleeping. He castigates the boy for the risqué images he finds, telling him his father needs to look at them. A…
Children are often told they can be anything they want when they grow up; they’re less commonly informed that the same rule applies when they die. After all, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham requested that his body be embalmed and put to service as the mascot of University College London, where his physical remains still cheerfully…
After a series of stops and starts, the art hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt — which will never stop sounding like the title of a sequel to “From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” — will receive its first public exhibits this fall. As The New York Times’s Alison Smale reported, the Kunstmuseum…
It’s not exactly news, since he didn’t exactly do anything, but we’re still kvelling over Drake right now. Word is that when the rapper’s tour bus encountered stalled traffic after a performance in Manchester, England this past weekend, and the rapper learned the backup was due to police attempting to persuade a man on a…
It’s a good rule of thumb that if a certain method of disseminating information has, say, recently provoked someone to fire an assault-style rifle in a crowded restaurant, it’s ill-advised to turn to that method to market your new film. That’s a memo that reached the folks at 20th Century Fox too late: As Buzzfeed…
In her first public statement since Donald Trump’s inauguration, released by video at AOL’s 2017 MAKERS Conference, Hillary Clinton uttered four words that caused a kerfuffle across the political spectrum: “The future is female.” As The Washington Post’s Katie Mettler reported, at the conference, which unsurprisingly skewed liberal — it was in California, for one…
It’s rarely considered good form, in the theater world, for high-level creatives involved in a production — producers, directors, etc. — to respond to that production’s reviews. That’s a rule with which Jack Viertel, senior vice president of Broadway theater operator Jujamcyn Theaters and artistic director of New York City Center’s Encores! series, is admittedly…
After Erwin Chemerinsky agreed to an interview with me, I sent a benignly gloating text to a friend who, in high school, had been my teammate in an intensive constitutional law competition. “Are you f****** kidding me right now,” he responded. Chemerinsky is something of an icon in the field of Constitutional law. Now, making…
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