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A ‘Breakdown’ Full Of Thrills, Chills And Social Ills

The opening scene of the latest V.I. Warshawski novel confirms the worst fears of any parent whose daughter has been swept up by the Twilight craze: Namely, books can be dangerous. It’s a dark and stormy summer night in Chicago, and V.I. is tracking a bunch of 12- and 13-year-old girls through an abandoned cemetery. [...]

‘Extremely Loud’ And Incredibly Manipulative

Some critics are indignant over Stephen Daldry’s film of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They say the appropriation of Sept. 11 for such a sentimental work is exploitation. It is a knotty issue. I think Foer wasn’t writing about Sept. 11 so much as using it to explore themes he introduced [...]

Tina Fey On Life, Motherhood, Writing And Comedy

This interview was originally broadcast on April 13, 2011. Bossypants is now available in paperback. Tina Fey grew up in a household with parents she has described as “Goldwater Republicans with pre-Norman Lear racial attitudes.” But, she says, her parents were always supportive of her career, even when she told them she was moving to [...]

This Weekend, Some New Shows (And Old Favorites)

The New Year brings with it new TV programming, and this Sunday is an especially busy one for television. Two new series premiere, while one miniseries and several other series return. But because it’s a new year, let’s start with the new shows. First up is NBC’s The Firm, a spinoff continuation of the John [...]

Tinker, Tailor, Actor, ‘Spy’

In author Thomas Caplan’s new novel, The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen, the president asks movie star Ty Hunter to return to action as a secret agent. Caplan himself is personally acquainted with a commander in chief. President Clinton and he were once roommates. “I was a student at Georgetown University. When we arrived [...]

‘Norwegian Wood’: Love And Loss, And Memory Too

“Hey, you’re not a liar, are you?” It’s 1967, and veracity is prized on college campuses. That’s why outgoing Tokyo student Midori (Japanese-American model-actress Kiko Mizuhara) interjects that odd question into her very first conversation with a quiet classmate, Watanabe (Death Note star Kenichi Matsuyama). In fact he’s not a liar. But the truth is [...]

Brownstein And Armisen’s Comedic Take On Portland

Soon after Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen became friends, they started making sketch-comedy videos. “We would email a link … to our friends, but they were mostly for us,” says Brownstein. “It was very understated and silly, and we were just sort of reveling in the absurd.” But the videos began to attract viewers outside [...]

Irresistible Novelties: The Allure Of The ‘New’

Winifred Gallagher, a science writer, journalist and former psychology editor of American Health, has published, among other things, a unified theory of attention span, a researched chronicle of her own “neoagnosticism,” an investigation into the nature of identity, and a cultural history of the handbag. Rearrange the Library of Congress subject headings produced by Gallagher’s [...]

Growing Up Muslim And Midwestern In ‘Dervish’

In American Dervish, playwright and author Ayad Akhtar draws from his own Midwestern childhood to tell the coming-of-age story of 10-year-old Hayat Shah, the son of Pakistani immigrants, whose humdrum world of baseball and video games is interrupted by the arrival of a family friend from Pakistan: the glamorous Mina, who’s fleeing a disastrous marriage. [...]