All posts tagged: Laura

Laura Loomer is MAGA’s last woman standing

Laura Loomer is MAGA’s last woman standing

Published by Sam Flores

Over the years, the MAGA movement has littered its path with the political carcasses of ambitious women who believed their public self-abasement would insulate them from the inevitable backlash. Karoline Leavitt is out. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was sent running back to Arkansas. Kellyanne Conway and Kayleigh McEnany landed safely at Fox News, the traditional waiting room for Republicans who remain useful to the party but no longer belong in Trump’s orbit. Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Marjorie Taylor Greene have all been thrown from the MAGA train in one form or another. SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler and Education Secretary Linda McMahon remain in the Cabinet, but neither occupies the feral, conspiratorial essence that Trump has increasingly made central to his movement. Every one of these women hitched her identity to Trump’s approval and every one of them eventually discovered what that approval is actually worth.  Loyalty has never been a two-way street for Trump. In his political universe, women are routinely promoted as avatars of showy devotion. No matter how badly they savage his enemies …

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares review – eyebrow-raising cringe comedy from a recovering people pleaser

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares review – eyebrow-raising cringe comedy from a recovering people pleaser

Published by Sam Flores

Among Americans, Tony award-winner (“and four-time Tony award loser,” as she self-deprecates here) Laura Benanti is a well-loved Broadway doyenne. But prior to national treasure status (boosted by her popular Melania Trump skits in recent years), she was a blushing innocent, performing on the Great White Way aged 18, being propositioned by bigshot producers and breaking her neck in a revival of Into the Woods. A “pathological people pleaser,” she didn’t raise a fuss, and the injury was covered up. This eyebrow-raising history contains quite enough to justify a 65-minute solo show about being, in Benanti’s words, a “recovering ingenue”. And when that’s what Nobody Cares is, it’s at its strongest. Delivered with musical director Todd Almond plus two-piece backing band, the show is cringingly funny about the younger Benanti’s conflict avoidance, as she lurches from one disastrous relationships to another and squirms out of a marriage proposal in the least appropriate way imaginable. That latter episode inspires a droll song, recounting grownup-Benanti’s equally cringy effort, years later, to make amends. This conceit, of middle-aged …

[Maybe more often than most…] | Laura Kolbe

[Maybe more often than most…] | Laura Kolbe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Maybe more often than most she buys mirrors.The pseudo-Biedermeier at the flea market—over its workaday planking a veneer of nicer wood. Nested chevronswhose tips center the breastbone.She breathes and the crosshairs lose her, re-hone.Her will to seek glass—viz., the tiny Carnegie-toy branch library she writes in.Its transparent saffron books floating through the Tiffany wall.Breton imagined truth in text as a sleepin a glass bed, under glass sheets.What does she keep hoping will happen by her purchaseof clarity without transparency? Keeps receiving in coated panes the answer to the answerinstead of the answer to the question. Source link

Visiting Privileges | Laura Miller

Visiting Privileges | Laura Miller

Published by Jenni Sidey

Early in The Hill, Harriet Clark’s extraordinary debut novel, the narrator, nine-year-old Suzanna, is let out of the car at an unfamiliar bank branch by Sylvie, her grandmother. “Read the plaque,” Sylvie orders, before driving off without her. Suzanna waits for hours in the bank’s vestibule—that practical but indeterminate space shielding the true interior from the intemperate outdoors—much to the bewilderment of the young security guard perched on a stool nearby. Eventually the bank closes, its tellers depart, and the guard crouches down to say, “You have to tell me who to call.” Just then, Sylvie drives up to retrieve her charge, who hasn’t set foot inside the bank itself but reports to her grandmother that it contains no plaque. The bank is where Suzanna’s mother, Helen, committed the crime that resulted in her life sentence. Sylvie wants Suzanna to know more about this, but Suzanna herself will not budge from that vestibule. She was an infant when Helen left to drive the getaway car for a team of bank robbers and never came back. …

The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave

The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave

Published by José Betancourt

Laura Dave’s literary career has consistently demonstrated her ability to weave emotional complexity into suspenseful narratives, from the wine-country charm of Eight Hundred Grapes to the Hollywood intrigue of Hello, Sunshine. However, it was The Last Thing He Told Me that catapulted her into the stratosphere of thriller writers, becoming a cultural phenomenon that spawned an Apple TV+ adaptation. Now, with The First Time I Saw Him, Dave returns to the Hannah Hall series, picking up precisely where that tantalizing epilogue left us breathless: with Owen Michaels walking back into Hannah’s life after five years of silence. The decision to write a sequel to such a beloved standalone carries inherent risks. Dave faces the challenge of satisfying readers who found closure in the first book while delivering a narrative that justifies its own existence. The result is a novel that expands the scope of Hannah’s world considerably, trading the intimate domesticity of a Sausalito houseboat for an international chase that spans from Los Angeles to Paris to the cliffside medieval village of Èze in the …

The Universalist | Laura Quinton

The Universalist | Laura Quinton

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Christopher Wheeldon’s most recent full-length ballet opens with a romantic and morbid image. When the curtain rises, thirteen women in white gowns appear standing in a horizontal line. Each bride holds a red rose and wears a mask—a white skull, suggesting the Calaveras Catrinas that appear on the Day of the Dead in Mexico, where the ballet is predominantly set. Slowly, the brides back away. As they turn to face upstage, we realize they’d had their backs to us all along. For the first time we see their stoic faces and the front halves of their costumes: black mourning robes. They sit down on a row of chairs far upstage and start knitting. You can sometimes forget these women as you’re absorbed by the winding drama of Like Water for Chocolate, Wheeldon’s first evening-length ballet in six years. But they’re there knitting for most of the first act. Their rigged chairs eventually levitate, showing what they’ve been making: a huge crocheted blanket. By the end of Act I the women have flown up and out …