This past year of masks, lockdowns, and capacity restrictions has been the most catastrophic 12 months in the history of movie theaters. It has also been a banner year for diversity at the Oscars. Continue Reading Neither Read More
Arts
LISTEN BY RACHEL MARTIN April is National Poetry Month, a celebration of poets and poetry that’s been in place for 25 years. Last month, as the U.S. grieved over attacks against Asian Americans, NPR’s Morning Edition collected poems on how people grapple with the increased violence and discrimination. Over 500 listeners shared powerful, poignant poems… Read More
Youn Yuh-jung is an institution in Korean cinema. Her career spans five decades and includes starring roles in classic Korean films and famous TV dramas. Now, at 73, she has newfound fame in the U.S. for her role in the Oscar-nominated film Minari. Read More
Libertie, a new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the third African American woman to earn a medical degree in this country. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: A Daughter Struggles To Read More
Growing up poor in Washington state, singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile learned about harmony and rhythm while performing as a backup singer for a friend's dad, who worked as an Elvis impersonator. Continue Reading Northwest Read More
In Dr. Fady Joudah’s poem “House of Mercury,” a severe summer storm has blown over Houston. The storm’s destructive winds woke up the narrator’s father, who hears the “snaps and creaks” of the two oaks in the front yard. But it was a “nearly uprooted fig tree,” the poem notes, that brought the father to tears. Read More
Ambreen Tariq's new children's book, Fatima's Great Outdoors is a story about an Indian immigrant family's first time exploring the outdoors, and it's as much a story about curiosity and adventure as it is about trying to assimilate as an immigrant in this country. Tariq says Fatima's story is her own story. "Every moment in that book is real. Every snippet, every story." Read More
Season two of the hit TV series Bridgerton will roll out for fans without its hunky star, Regé-Jean Page, who played Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. Set during the Regency era in 1813 London, the show's first season was a steamy love story between Simon and Daphne Bridgerton. Read More
The author of two poetry books and a member of the Lhaq'temish (Lummi) Nation, Priest is the sixth poet and first Native person to be selected for the two-year term, a program of the Washington State Arts Commission and Humanities Washington. Continue Read More
Nearly 140 documentary filmmakers have signed onto a letter given to PBS executives, suggesting the service may provide an unfair level of support to white creators, facing a "systemic failure to fulfill (its) mandate for a diversity of voices." Read More
Near the end of HBO's new documentary, Tina, the movie implies the legendary singer has made a decision: after this film rolls out, Tina Turner just might be done appearing in public and talking about her life. It's an odd message, coming from a woman whose life story and experiences have inspired at least four books, an Oscar-nominated biopic, a Broadway musical and, now, Read More
Eddie Izzard, the wildly-admired and inventive comic, was in a museum in the British resort town of Bexhill-on-Sea, where she spent much time as a child, when historians showed her an old badge from the Augusta Victoria school for girls in the 1930's. There was a Union Jack on the crest — and a Nazi swastika. Read More
The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being young-ish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taut novel is that while it is, indeed, about all those grim subjects, Read More
Children's author Beverly Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, Calif., her publisher HarperCollins said. She was 104 years old. Cleary was the creator of some of the most authentic characters in children's literature — Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse and the irascible Ramona Quimby. Read More
Artist James Ransome is a huge Parliament-Funkadelic fan. So much so, that one of their tunes provided the soundtrack when Ransome accepted the Society of Illustrators' Gold Award during a virtual ceremony on Thursday. Continue Reading Read More
There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her, Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth/Stanley Tucci drama Supernova. But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father, a powerful new chamber drama built Read More
James Levine, the immensely accomplished conductor who wielded power and influence in the classical world, and whose singular tenure at the Metropolitan Opera ended in a flurry of accusations of sexual abuse, died on March 9 in Palm Springs, Calif. His physician of 17 years, Dr. Len Horovitz, confirmed his death to NPR, saying that Levine died of natural causes. He was 77 Read More
In John Lanchester's collection, Reality and Other Stories, the supernatural manifests itself through cell phones, social media, computers, reality tv shows, and smart houses. "Signal," the opening story, was originally published in The New Yorker and it's a standout: an eerie homage to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Read More
What more is there to say about Frida Kahlo? She died in 1954 at age 47. By now she's a cottage industry. Her face (that unibrow, the red lips, the scores of self portraits) reproduced on mugs, matchbooks, pandemic masks, of course tote bags. Read More
Once Upon a Quinceañera opens in Miami, the summer after Carmen Aguilar's senior year. Due to an incomplete internship credit, Carmen has yet to graduate high school. So she's working for an event company called Dreams Come True, where she dresses up as a singing, dancing Disney Princess for birthday parties. She's at one of these parties (dressed as Belle) with her best Read More
Decades later, Birmingham News Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist John Archibald is trying to do just that. Archibald comes from a long line of Methodist preachers in the South; his father had a pulpit at a critical time and place in American history — 1960s Alabama. Read More
With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed -- Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer -- continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means "Nameless"). Having survived a communist reeducation camp, a perilous sea crossing, and a long sojourn in an Indonesian refugee center, he arrives in Read More
Dr. Seuss Enterprises will cease publishing six of the author's books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo — saying they "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." The books have been criticized for how they depict Asian and Black people. Read More
NPR talks to Ahuja about the inspiration and process behind capturing the girls' ordinary lives: their hopes, dreams, anxieties and frustrations. Continue Reading In ‘Girlhood,’ Teens Across The Globe Write About Their Everyday Read More
One hundred years ago, America's first museum of modern art opened in a private mansion in Washington, D.C. Founder Duncan Phillips was an early collector of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh. The Phillips was the first to buy a Georgia O'Keeffe. Decades ago, in this city of museums, it became my favorite one. Read More
The travails of immigrant life take a quietly beguiling form in Minari, a semi-autobiographical film by Lee Isaac Chung that brims with humor, humanity and hope. Showing us characters new to American screens, the story centers on a South Korean family named Yi who hope to make a go of farming in rural Arkansas during the Reagan years. Minari takes its title from the name Read More
The Met is the largest performing arts organization in the United States, employing close to 3,000 people, with an annual budget of over $300 million. When it shut down because of COVID last March, the company cited the force majeure provision of its agreements, and made the decision to furlough all its union artists and craftspeople. Read More
Nubia: Real One doesn't take place on Wonder Woman's home island Themyscira, but somewhere in modern-day America — though a modern-day America in which superheroes are a real thing. And Nubia is not an adult woman warrior who knows who and what she is (as she did when she first appeared in 1973's Wonder Woman Vol. 1 #204), no. This is McKinney's take on Nubia for real. Read More
In his latest documentary series and book, “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song,” Gates examines the cultural institution within Black communities. He explains how the Black Church has played such a vital role in Black liberation, since its beginnings. And along with viewing the Black church through a critical eye and exploring its origin, the new PBS Read More
Every year, as a set-up for the Tony Awards, we take you backstage to meet people who aren't even eligible. These are Broadway's essential workers – ushers, stage managers, costumers. But this year, the Tonys seem like a faraway dream; even though nominations for the shortened season were announced in October, no date has been set. So, I decided to check in with some of Read More
The emergence of AIDS provides the impetus for It's a Sin, a hit British series about five young people who share a London apartment over the years from 1981 to '91. The show is the semi-autobiographical brainchild of Russell T. Davies, a writer best known for creating Queer as Folk and resurrecting Doctor Who. With his gimlet eye for the pop jugular, Davies turns the Read More
For many families, paying for college is one of the biggest financial decisions they'll make. College tuition is the highest it's ever been — and the financial aid process is anything but clear. American journalist Ron Lieber's new book, The Price You Pay for College aims to take the black box of college financials and, "turn it lighter and lighter shades of gray." Read More
Lunar New Year hits differently this year. It's an annual holiday celebrated on a bedrock of bringing families, across the country and overseas, together for home-cooked meals and lots of catching up. Continue Reading Korean American Read More
Johnson says she wrote You Should See Me in a Crown for her readers, yes, but also for herself: "I wanted to remind myself that it is possible to be Black and queer and from where you're from, and still get all the best things out of life." Continue Read More
One of the virtues of Judas and the Black Messiah is that it gives us such a captivating sense of who Hampton was. He's played here by an electrifying Daniel Kaluuya, who captures the young man's gift for inspiring other activists and his ferocious critique of the nation's white power structure. Read More
The book is guided by the structure of time. We go full circle from June through to May; summer through to spring. There is a poem for each month, just as there is a poem for each feeling. Pleasure, annoyance, boredom, spiritual awakening — we feel it all. And as the poems travel through time, the poet's vulnerability and loneliness are palpable enough to, perhaps Read More
The roads taken by the family in The Removed, Brandon Hobson's new novel, are essential ones in this moment of national reclaiming. The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It's also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, Read More
In 2012, when he was already well into his 80s, Christopher Plummer told NPR that he was busier than he had been in a long time – and that was OK with him. "You never stop learning how to act, both on screen and on the stage," he said. "I feel like I'm starting all over again. Every sort of decade I feel this, and that's very satisfying." Read More
Tove Ditlevsen's brilliance is evident when you read her confessional memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is newly available in a crisp translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Told in a sneakily plain, highly addictive voice, it's the portrait of the artist as a young woman who wrote as hard as she lived. Read More
Author Rachel Lynn Solomon based the story partly on her own experience. "Shay's journey mirrors mine in a lot of ways," she tells me via email. "We both studied journalism in college, and at the beginning of the book, she produces a talk show similar to the one I worked on in my early twenties. I also reported a handful of stories and produced a weekly pre-recorded show Read More
Chelsea Clinton has taken her bestselling She Persisted series of picture books, and with the help of some pretty amazing women in their own right, is turning them into chapter books. Chapter books! Clinton says chapter books were not part of the original vision for She Persisted, but when she saw that kids were getting more and more curious about the women featured in the Read More
In the new film "Palmer," Justin Timberlake plays Eddie, a former high school football star who comes back to his Louisiana hometown after more than a decade in prison. As he pieces together his new life, Eddie moves in with his grandmother and befriends her young neighbor, a boy named Sam. Read More
Mama (Beautiful Skin) — Natal-San Miguel added the parenthesis — belongs to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C. It's part of their first online exhibition. Twenty six of Natal-San Miguel's photos are on view in "Expanding the Pantheon: Women R Beautiful." His subject in this one has vitiligo. Pigment is missing from parts of her skin. She's dappled. And Natal-San Miguel Read More
Some time into his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow recalls hearing Harry Belafonte give a speech. Continue Reading BOOK REVIEW: Charles Blow’s ‘The Devil You Know’ Is A Read More
When Amanda Gorman wrote her poem, “The Miracle of Morning,” it was early on in the coronavirus pandemic, when we were only beginning to comprehend the scale of national mourning to come. But even then, she wanted to acknowledge the promise of healing, like the light of morning, that springs from despair. Read More
On Jan. 25, 1996, a new rock musical by a little-known writer, Jonathan Larson, gave its first performance. Friends and family filed into a small off-Broadway theater to see Rent. The show was a retelling of La Boheme, set on the Lower East Side of New York, as people were dying of AIDS. It became an international phenomenon, winning the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, Read More
The new children’s book by ballet star Misty Copeland is filled with direct nods to real people in her life who have encouraged her talent over the years, but also the more universal ways that dance friends become sources of inspiration for one other. Read More
At the start of the story, Fatima is a young Ghanian girl who has taken on the mantle of the Adopted Daughter of Death. Renamed Sankofa — an avian symbol of the West African Akan people, one that embodies the idea of harnessing the past to forge a better tomorrow — she wanders the land, inducing dread and awe in the towns she encounters, a living legend wielding the power Read More
Amanda Gorman echoed, in dynamic and propulsive verse, the same themes that Biden has returned to again and again and that he wove throughout his inaugural address: unity, healing, grief and hope, the painful history of American experience and the redemptive power of American ideals. Read More
An art project that turned the border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border into the temporary base for pink seesaws – inviting children on each side to come play together – has won the London's Design Museum award for best design of 2020. Continue Read More
