A century of jazz has produced many great singers. Few have ever represented or defined the genre quite like Ella Fitzgerald, often called the “First Lady of Song” and “Lady Ella” during her long and successful career. She sang like a morning songbird. Her tone and pitch on every memorable track were perfect. Her stage presence and ability to captivate an entire room had few equals.
I was writer-director Emerald Fennell's target audience for Saltburn: a British Gen Zer that takes great pleasure in sneering at upper-class Oxford types and loves anything vacuous. I expected that it would be like a posh Skins, with bratty toffs spraying Dom Perignon into each other's mouths instead of a six-pack of the cheapest beer. I was told by even my most stylish of friends that it was like TikTok-ified Brideshead Revisited, or The Talented Mr. Ripley with a bit of softcore pornography. They are friends no longer, dropped for having such bad opinions, now that I’ve had a few days to mull over the single worst film I have ever watched.
Since the early aughts, book publishers’ profits have tanked. In raw numbers, they have remained almost exactly the same: U.S. book industry revenues were $25.3 billion in 2000, and they were $25.7 billion in 2020. But accounting for inflation, revenues have fallen by 32% between 2000 and last year.
In a 1993 short story by Tobias Wolff, an obit columnist loses his job when one of his subjects turns up alive. Though Obituary, Hulu’s blacker than black dramedy of journalistic manners, doesn’t echo Wolff precisely, its ironies are of a similar kind. To write about death all day is a dangerous business. One never knows how one’s life might change.
For years, Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), one of Germany’s most popular and most celebrated writers from the second half of the 20th century, was an unknown quantity in the English-speaking world. Only recently has he begun to register on Anglophone readers’ radars, thanks to the publication of a couple of his works in translation. Those books delve into the past and examine the impact of World War II on Germans — how the brutality and futility of the conflict inflicted personal pain and engendered collective guilt.
Former Rep. George Santos was unceremoniously expelled from Congress last week for crimes he allegedly committed and essentially being a pathological liar. Objectively, anyone familiar with Santos's falsehoods probably wouldn’t object to his expulsion except for two possible reasons: inconsistencies and double standards. Santos might have committed crimes, and he repeatedly lied to seemingly everyone. However, Santos was not the only member of Congress to do so — including several who remain in office and escaped any punishment thus far.
The moral degeneracy of the presidents of three prestigious universities who recently refused to condemn calls for genocide clearly is symptomatic of a larger problem. The long-term solution must be to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies and policies, root and branch, from higher education.
“This never used to happen,” United States Postal Service letter carrier Edward Fletcher told SFGate at a National Association of Letter Carriers rally in San Francisco. “I did carry mail for over 15 years, and it was unheard of that a letter carrier would get robbed.”
