‘It’s a pattern really. So many of the progressive writers and illustrators of children’s books were Jews,” says Leonard Marcus, who does not usually concern himself with the old parlor game of counting famous Jews. Marcus is curator of the New York Public Library’s exhibit on children’s literature, “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books…
A version of this story first appeared on Women’s Voices for Change. The best comic novel I’ve read this year wasn’t published by Random House or Penguin. It was self-published by Philadelphia writer Stacia Friedman. The title? “Tender is the Brisket.” Does the book live up to the comic promise of that title? Absolutely. Ruth…
“Call me Ishmael,” declares one of the most famous opening sentences in Western literature. But what if the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” was actually asking you to call him? That was the whimsical thought Logan Smalley offered in a spirited bar conversation about notable first sentences. He jotted the notion down on a…
Apparently all that plastic surgery didn’t give Joan Rivers a thick skin. On July 5, Joan Rivers made headlines after she stormed out of a CNN interview claiming the anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, was asking increasingly “negative questions.” Rivers, known for her (sometimes) off-color jokes has picked on everyone from Paula Deen to the Jennifer Lawrence….
“Some working actors lost the best years of their lives and don’t know why.” Those words were written by actress/director Lee Grant in her new memoir, “I Said Yes To Everything.” And she should know. She was one of them. Grant was the “surprise discovery” of the 1950 Broadway season for her role in “Detective…
Most people who recognize Jennifer Weiner know her as an author of fiction aimed at women, a writer whose pastel-covered covers perennially crowd the best-seller list and command an audience most novelists would salivate over. She has written 11 books and had one made into a rom-com starring Cameron Diaz (the 2005 film “In Her…
It’s a scenario that the Yiddish writers of yore could never have predicted, and yet by which they likely would have been tickled: Today, their work is being digitized with the help of a home-made scanner built by a former Baptist from Indiana who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As of mid…
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
דער פּאָדקאַסט גיט איצט אויך אָן די לינקס צו די געדרוקטע אַרטיקלען וואָס ווערן פֿאָרגעלייענט.
100% of profits support our journalism
