All posts tagged: lesson

Maria Friedman calls Kimberly Akimbo “a wonderful life lesson”

Maria Friedman calls Kimberly Akimbo “a wonderful life lesson”

Published by Daniella Wilson

Few people can truly be called a musical theatre legend. But with an illustrious career over 40 years as an actress and director adorned with Tony and Olivier Awards, Maria Friedman certainly falls into this category. Hot on the heels of her celebrated run as director of Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway, Friedman is putting her acting shoes back on, this time on the London stage. She’s playing Kimberly in Kimberly Akimbo at Hampstead Theatre, a musical which she describes as “really complex, beautiful show with a wonderful message”. For those unfamiliar with the show, Kimberly Levaco is an ordinary teenage girl, except for one thing: she’s got a degenerative illness that causes her to age four to five times as quickly as the average person. Kimberly Akimbo follows her life in New Jersey developing crushes, fighting with her family and getting up to mischief, all with the looming knowledge that her time is limited. It’s thought-provoking, it’s hilarious, it’s raw and, above all, it’s life-affirming. Speaking exclusively to Radio Times, Maria Friedman described …

The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of The Atlantic’s November issue that year, “The Runaway Presidency,” Schlesinger cast President Richard Nixon’s abuses as the result of long-standing historical trends that had empowered the chief executive, and in the process offered a hopeful prognosis for what was to come. “Watergate,” Schlesinger wrote, “is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken.” Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, marking an end …

Obama’s Lesson for Caitlin Clark—And Americans

Obama’s Lesson for Caitlin Clark—And Americans

Published by Daniella Wilson

Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly. Here was the ultra-suave Barack Obama’s message to the basketball player Caitlin Clark in a small but noteworthy exchange over the WNBA All-Star weekend: It never hurts to be winsome. In fact, it can help you win. Can you imagine Donald Trump in the same situation, what he’d have done or said, the race-baiting and appeal to baseness? As if Trump would even deign to meet a WNBA player, that is. He prefers to use the league’s players from afar for his own purposes. His White House has made the WNBA a flash point for attacks on transgender athletes, and he and his hard-right allies have tried to make Clark out to be a victim …

Baby seal gets a swimming lesson

Baby seal gets a swimming lesson

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. While it may look as simple as sticking a GoPro into the water, capturing videos of marine animals in the Antarctic is no easy feat. Postdoctoral student Kaitlin Allen and her Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) can’t watch what they’re filming in real time, so the team has no idea what is being recorded until they pull the device back out and connect it to a laptop, Allen tells Popular Science.  Sometimes the footage doesn’t capture anything important. Other times, however, it records crucial animal dynamics rarely witnessed by humans. A recently released  video Allen and colleagues captured in 2015 (under the proper permit) is one such example. The series of remarkable and admittedly adorable clips featuring a chunky Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) …

Appreciation: L.A.’s ultimate monster: The lesson of Veda Pierce

Appreciation: L.A.’s ultimate monster: The lesson of Veda Pierce

Published by Sam Flores

From the beginning, Mildred Pierce vowed that her daughter Veda would have all the things this newly blossoming postwar suburban paradise could offer. They lived in a charming Spanish Colonial house in Glendale, the kind of place where there were more kids than cars on the street. Veda’s days were filled with stickball, piano lessons and ballet. If she fancied a dress in the display window at the Broadway or Bullocks, it would appear in a fancy box on her bed a few days later. But this pampered childhood was not enough for Veda. She had her eye on the bigger house, the fancier car, the wealthier man — a drive for riches that would destroy her life and make her one of the greatest L.A. movie villains of all time. Veda died last week. Well, the actor who played her, Ann Blyth, passed away at 98. But this L.A. monster is so etched into my mind that I long ago stopped being able to differentiate between the actorand the character. Veda’s story unfolds in …

The theology lesson in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’

The theology lesson in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’

Published by Sam Flores

This essay contains spoilers. Keep reading at your own cinematic risk. (RNS) — I went to see “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg’s new film, expecting a science-fiction thriller. But I also came away with a theological essay. To understand “Disclosure Day,” you have to see it as the third installment of a trilogy that Spielberg never announced but has been making for almost a half-century. First, there was “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), the story of an Indiana electrician named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with visions of a particular mountain after a UFO encounter. He makes a pilgrimage to Devils Tower in Wyoming, where humans and the alien visitors meet in a spectacular exchange of light and music. The aliens are not the typical fiends of Cold War-era science fiction. They are soft, docile, childlike and androgynous. They return their human abductees unharmed. The encounter is peaceful and spiritual. I, and more than a few other rabbis, would show this movie as part of a study session on the Jewish festival of …

Haiti thump New Zealand 4-0 in ‘harsh lesson’ before World Cup

Haiti thump New Zealand 4-0 in ‘harsh lesson’ before World Cup

Published by Sam Flores

June 2 : Haiti crushed a shambolic New Zealand 4-0 in a steamy World Cup warmup in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Tuesday, delighting a buzzing crowd of Haitian fans and spoiling a milestone match for All Whites captain Chris Wood. Ruben Providence struck in the 12th minute at Inter Miami CF Stadium and substitute Lenny Joseph doubled the lead for the 82nd-ranked Caribbeans six minutes after the restart. Frantzdy Pierrot grabbed a third with a header after the hour-mark before Markhus Lacroix finished the demolition job with a late, long-range rocket as the counter-punching Grenadiers dismantled the World Cup’s lowest-ranked nation. World number 82 Haiti, only three places better than New Zealand, meet Scotland, Brazil and Morocco on their return to the World Cup for the first time in 52 years. Haiti’s buildup to the match had been complicated by visa trouble for midfielder Woodensky Pierre, the squad’s only player based in the Caribbean nation. Pierre was unable to play against the New Zealanders because his visa was not approved by U.S. authorities until too …

Met’s Costume Institute Needs a History Lesson

Met’s Costume Institute Needs a History Lesson

Published by José Betancourt

Anyone who’s ever taken an art history course knows the drill: put two artworks side by side, and figure out where they intersect and diverge. The exercise involves IDing those objects, stating who made them and why, and accounting for formal innovations across time and cultural differences. Essentially, the discipline is predicated upon a gussied-up game of compare-and-contrast. “Costume Art,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big Costume Institute show for the spring season, attempts to continue the tradition. People will flock to this blockbuster to see rarified dresses in sleekly designed galleries, as they always do. But this time the stars of the show also include artworks from the Met’s collection placed next to the fashion on display. Running the gamut from ancient Greek statues to screenprints by Andy Warhol, the artworks are set beside dresses by designers ranging from Charles James to CFGNY, a collective whose work can also be found in the Whitney Biennial. Source link

The Lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s Flip-Flop

The Lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s Flip-Flop

Published by José Betancourt

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. After ordering the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani killed in 2020, Donald Trump claimed that the military officer had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.” But that justification didn’t pass muster with then–Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard had long been explicit in her insistence that a president cannot unilaterally decide to attack another country in anticipatory self-defense. She’d even co-sponsored the No More Presidential Wars Act in 2018, which stated that the president must “seek congressional authorization prior to any engagement of the U.S. Armed Forces against Syria, Iran, or Russia.” It was not surprising when, in spite of Trump’s determination that Soleimani had posed an imminent threat, Gabbard insisted that the president had “committed an illegal and unconstitutional act.” Gabbard also warned that a war against Iran in particular would be “so costly …

“Undertone” embodies horror’s crucial less-is-more lesson

“Undertone” embodies horror’s crucial less-is-more lesson

Published by Sam Flores

As far as horror films go, writer-director Ian Tuason’s debut feature “Undertone” has just about everything a genre connoisseur could ever want, all rolled into one. The movie is packed with religious iconography, scary voices, possessed objects, ancient demons with silly names, maniacal senior citizens, dubious mirrors, dark corners, creepy children’s songs, creepy children’s songs played backwards, and — most terrifying of all — podcasters. With the dust from the mid-2010s podcast boom finally settling, it was only a matter of time until the medium that has become an integral part of our daily lives got the star treatment. Podcasts have been supporting elements in horror for a minute, popping up in films like “Tusk” and 2018’s “Halloween” reboot, but they’ve yet to function as a true main character. Strange, considering the medium made true-crime and horror storytelling into a viable cottage industry. But whether you’re for or against that type of voyeuristic podcasting doesn’t matter here. Unlike other horror films, “Undertone” doesn’t make podcasters the butt of the joke or a predictable first-out kill. …