All posts tagged: Susan

Susan Collins’ time is up as Maine’s Houdini

Susan Collins’ time is up as Maine’s Houdini

Published by Sam Flores

Susan Collins is very concerned — and she should be. As a politician who has only run for one office in her life and held the same seat for nearly 30 years, the Maine senator is facing a possible loss in what looks more and more like a big blue wave coming in November’s midterm elections. As the rare GOP senator representing a blue state, she should be the first one caught in that undertow. But Collins is a rare creature: a virtual Houdini who has always managed to fend off defeat during tough elections. Whether she will somehow work her magic again is one of the biggest questions of 2026. At the start of this election cycle, Democrats had two competing strategies about how to beat her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was convinced that because more women than men vote in the state and Collins wins most of them, the answer was to find a Democratic woman that closely matched Collins’ profile. So he persuaded the popular Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, 79, to …

Learning from Discerning | Susan Tallman

Learning from Discerning | Susan Tallman

Published by Jenni Sidey

It would be hard on the face of it to find dustier-sounding topics in art than those suggested by Peter Burke’s The Connoisseur: A Cultural History and Shira Brisman’s The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art. And yet the questions lurking at the heart of both books could hardly be more timely: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect that value, and for whose benefit? The stories told by Burke and Brisman are both rooted in the swirl of ideas and adaptive behaviors that animated early modern Europe (the era formerly known as the Renaissance), as people worked to square humanistic ideals about individual creativity with new technologies and new ways of accumulating wealth and power. Sound familiar? The goldsmith of Brisman’s title is Christoph Jamnitzer, a maker of ornate tableware and madcap ornamental prints in Nuremberg at the turn of the seventeenth century. Christoph’s grandfather was the famous Wenzel Jamnitzer, goldsmith to the stars (in the form of four Holy Roman Emperors) and …

Is Morality Universal? | Susan Neiman

Is Morality Universal? | Susan Neiman

Published by Jenni Sidey

Every August the Irish village of Killorglin puts on the Puck Fair. A local girl on the cusp of puberty is chosen to be Queen Puck, and a wild male goat is captured in the neighboring mountains, paraded through town, crowned King Puck, and then caged on a high platform around which thousands of people sing, dance, and drink for three days and nights. On the side streets, small stands sell bad food and plastic trinkets, while a few Travellers, Ireland’s indigenous nomads, work rival fortune-telling franchises. Recent concerns about animal welfare have led to the hiring of a veterinary surgeon who ensures that the goat is healthy when it’s returned to the wild. There’s no agreement about when and why this custom began, so there’s no way to explain its purpose; speculations about its origins range from ancient pagan fertility rites to gratitude for the goat that alerted residents to the approach of Oliver Cromwell’s troops in the mid-seventeenth century. Killorglin advertises the Puck Fair as Ireland’s oldest festival; some claim it has taken …

André Breton’s Encounters | Susan Rubin Suleiman

André Breton’s Encounters | Susan Rubin Suleiman

Published by Jenni Sidey

It has been a long wait for a new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (1928), the quintessential Surrealist narrative. Breton’s often tortuous and highly idiomatic prose style presents an enormous challenge to translators. Richard Howard’s version, which appeared in 1960, was a valiant attempt, but it suffered from too many errors. Mark Polizzotti, the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995) as well as the translator of a number of books by the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, has now produced a much more readable and accurate rendering of this classic work (though even he stumbles now and then). Yet to call Nadja a classic is in a sense to betray it, for the Surrealists despised “classics,” whether in art or politics. Officially founded in 1924 with the publication of the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (written by Breton) and the launch of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, the Surrealist movement defined itself as a revolutionary enterprise. Its proclaimed intention was not merely to change the ways of art and literature but …

Susan Sarandon, Aubrey Plaza Drama

Susan Sarandon, Aubrey Plaza Drama

Published by Daniella Wilson

There’s a high level of difficulty in what Susan Sarandon pulls off with apparent ease in The Accompanist. As Sylvia, the foster parent of a young girl, she plays a character who is a little wacky and indulgent, kind and at times wise but with emotional baggage of her own. And Sarandon turns what might have been a blueprint for sentimentality and clichés into a believable, idiosyncratic, very present individual. In fact, all the performances in this feature debut from director Zach Woods, best known as an actor in comedies including the HBO series Silicon Valley, are grounded and sharp. They are the strongest element of a story about nine-year-old Emily (Everly Carganilla), whose grandfather and guardian (Kevyn Morrow) is showing serious signs of dementia. Aubrey Plaza, in a small role, plays an inept social worker who hauls Emily out of her house to Sylvia’s in a nearby New Jersey town. The Accompanist The Bottom Line A jumble of lovely and twee. Venue: Tribeca Festival (Spotlight Narrative)Cast: Susan Sarandon, Aubrey Plaza, Everly Carganilla, Kevyn Morrow, …

Susan Boyle reveals her singing voice is still recovering from stroke after four years: ‘I am getting there’

Susan Boyle reveals her singing voice is still recovering from stroke after four years: ‘I am getting there’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Susan Boyle has revealed that she underwent “a lot” of speech therapy after suffering a stroke four years ago – but her singing voice still hasn’t fully recovered. The Britain’s Got Talent star made TV history in 2009 when she auditioned for the ITV show, taking the judges and viewers by surprise with her stunning rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from 1980 musical Les Misérables. The Scottish singer went on to sell over 10 million copies of her debut album and perform at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant before suffering a minor stroke in 2023. While Boyle, 65, returned to the BGT to perform just months after the stroke, she has now admitted that her singing voice is yet to return to normal. Susan Boyle in her first audition for Britain’s Got Talent in 2009 (ITV) “I never thought I would be able to come this far. I’ve had a lot of encouragement and the public have been so ­loving to me,” she told The Sun. “I have had a lot of speech therapy. …

People Are Already 'Gagged' Over Susan Boyle's Fabulous 'New Era' Tease

People Are Already 'Gagged' Over Susan Boyle's Fabulous 'New Era' Tease

Published by Sam Flores

Susan Boyle pictured in London Susan Boyle has really captured people’s attention with an intriguing new social media post. The I Dreamed A Dream singer has now been teasing her musical comeback for some time now, but on Wednesday afternoon, she hinted that the wait could finally be over. After wiping her entire Instagram feed, she shared some fabulous new pictures of herself in a full-length fur coat (not the ideal attire for a heatwave, let’s be honest), expensive-looking sunnies and a blunt blonde bob, walking down the street, sitting in the back of a car and, crucially, recording at London’s Metropolis Studios. View this post on Instagram She also teased that a “new era starts tomorrow” (adding a cryptic “#ad” in the comments too). The Grammy nominee’s glamorous new look and tease about her “new era” have already got people’s imaginations running wild, not to mention sparking plenty of chat over on social media. The bob!! The popgirlies are finished!!!! https://t.co/hYt93sLPqA — vibes sedai (@VibesSedai) May 27, 2026 I don't know what Susan Boyle …

Manet and Morisot: Game On | Susan Tallman

Manet and Morisot: Game On | Susan Tallman

Published by José Betancourt

In the spring of 1870, Berthe Morisot was fretting over one of her submissions to that year’s Paris Salon. Still in her twenties, Morisot was a respected painter, best known for her landscapes, and had been tutored by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the influential Barbizon school painter of fluttery fields and woodlands. She had shown in all but one of the previous six Salons, but the new work was a departure—a double portrait of her beloved sister Edma and their mother, seated together while Mme Morisot reads. On the advice of the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Morisot had reworked her mother’s head but was still dissatisfied. Seeking another set of eyes, she turned to Édouard Manet. He and Morisot had become friends—their families ran in the same circles, and she had served as a model (clothes on, with her mother in attendance) for his enigmatic set piece The Balcony (1868–1869). He came round to consult and, Morisot reported, thought her double portrait “very good” with the exception of the lower part of Mme Morisot’s dress. To …

What Susan Rice Really Meant By Her Retribution Threat

What Susan Rice Really Meant By Her Retribution Threat

Published by Jenni Sidey

Via The Daily Signal, This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson.  Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador under the Obama administration, national security adviser, and also served in various capacities with former President Joe Biden, gave an interview on a podcast with Preet Bharara. He is that very liberal federal prosecutor that developed quite a name for himself in New York, going after, I think, targeted a lot of people based on their politics. But nonetheless, it was one of the strangest interviews because she flat out, candidly, with no reservations, sent a message to people who were conservative, Republican, or Trump supporters, and she used “Game of Thrones” imagery. “You’ve taken the need of [President] Donald Trump. You have allowed him to bully you.” She was talking about the so-called elites in the academic world, in the corporate world, in the institutional world. “And we’re not going to forget,” she says, “that you did that. And you better have your documents ready because when …

The Empire Gives Back | Susan Tallman

The Empire Gives Back | Susan Tallman

Published by José Betancourt

In 1891 the Metropolitan Museum of Art set about raising $100,000 (about $3.5 million today) to purchase a collection of plaster casts large enough to compete with those in Boston (777) and Chicago (247), if not Berlin (more than 2,000). Casts were an accepted way to fulfill the museum’s mission of improving local audiences through great art, especially since, as a Met spokesman at the time explained, “we can never expect to obtain any large collection of original works.” Oh, the difference 135 years makes. Today the Met holds over a million and a half artworks—the vast majority of them “original” by most definitions. But originality turns out to have its drawbacks. Over the past ten years the museum has had to return dozens of objects shown to have been illegally removed from their places of origin or stolen from their rightful owners.1 Sixteen ancient sculptures went back to Cambodia and Thailand, another seventeen works to India, nineteen to Egypt, twenty-one to Italy and Greece. Smaller returns have been made to Iraq, Nepal, and Turkey. …