The new beach read. It’s less a pulpy work of summer escapism — and more a musing on an evolving ecogical disaster »
Haruki Murakami: “While the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel” Haruki Murakami »
This weekend's By the Book-column in The New York Times Book Review features the Novelist as a Vocation-author, in What Books Does Haruki Murakami Find Disappointing ? His Own.
Among his responses:
While I’m writing a novel, I often translate fiction. It’s a nice change of pace, an excellent way to make a mental switch. Translating uses a different part of the brain from composing a novel, so it keeps one side of my brain from wearing out.
And I can certainly appreciate this attitude:
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite ?
My apologies, but I’m not big on dinner parties.
It was 1978 and Haruki Murakami was watching a baseball game when he suddenly realized: I think I can write a novel Haruki Murakami »
William Godwin believed himself immune to the tumults and desires experienced by others. Then he met Mary Wollstonecraft God Win »
Franz Kafka, aphorist. His work in this genre is low-key, discreetly funny, and extremely strange Imrich Kafka »
Read old books, says Michael Dirda. "The great books are great because they speak to us, generation after generation" Read old books »
What's captivating about Dylan's songwriting is the strange mix of care and carelessness. Not so in his prose captivating »
The latest development in “things that make you think our universe is a simulation created for the entertainment of more advanced beings” is that a philosopher is being pilloried online for how she limits her children’s consumption of Halloween candy.
Interview With “Candy Mom” Philosopher
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Mind-Controlled Wheelchair Brings New Freedom to People With Paralysis
GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH: She Said Pays Tribute to the Reporters Who Brought Down a Monster — and Started a Movement.
[T]he cold calls, the knocking on doors, the after-hours research digs, the dogged excavations of data that unexpectedly dig up a big break. And it was that type of work that led New York Times‘ reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohy to eventually publish a 3,300 word article that detailed film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault — and how, thanks to a network of complicity, the fear of an industry and a series of huge payouts, he’d managed to avoid accountability for his crimes. It had been an open secret for ages, and a story that many journalists had been trying to break for years. Kantor and Twohy were the ones who finally managed to get enough folks to go on the record. Their piece was followed a few days later by Ronan Farrow’s expose in the New Yorker. And then the dam broke.
She Said knows that you know how this story ends, or given that there’s really no “end” in sight, what happens next: court cases, felony charges, the birth of the #MeToo movement, the backlash, and long legacies of abuse finally being dragged into the light. Not just in show business, either — almost every industry has had to reckon with its share of monsters in the wake of their Weinstein story and its aftermath. Like the 2019 book of the same name, this often compelling drama wants to show you the blood, sweat and gallons of spilled tears that went into getting that story published, as well as the sacrifices made, the threats issued and the brick walls that this duo encountered. It’s a movie that’s not about justice so much as it’s about old-fashioned investigative journalism. Watch exactly how the muckraking sausage gets made.
It’s Hollywood’s equivalent of Dan Rather muttering, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story,” in the immediate wake of getting caught over RatherGate, as this IMDB trivia point highlights (paragraph breaks mine):
Brad Pitt is one of this film’s producers. Pitt was aware of the sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein decades before buying the rights to the book in which this movie is based on. Pitt dated Gwyneth Paltrow (from 1994 to 1997), who accused Weinstein of sexually harassing her in the 1990s while she was dating Pitt, who knew about it since Paltrow told him when it happened, according to her interview on the Howard Stern Show on May 23, 2018. Peter Biskind, the author of the 2004 book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film” (which depicts Weinstein as a brutish, violent man who nevertheless managed to charm all the right people in Hollywood), told Vanity Fair in October 2017 that he learned of the incident while reporting his 2001 Vanity Fair cover on Brad Pitt, but wasn’t able to mention it in his story because Pitt had gone off-the-record.
“He made me turn the tape recorder off … but he did say he liked Harvey, despite the advances he had made on Gwyneth Paltrow,” Biskind said. Pitt was also married to Angelina Jolieuntil 2016 (with whom he had 6 children and a 12-year relationship), who also accused Weinstein of sexually harassing her in the beginning of her career. In 2009, Pitt starred in Inglourious Basterds (2009), which was produced by Weinstein and distributed by The Weinstein Company, and a few years later he approached Weinstein and asked him to produce the movie Killing Them Softly(2012). Jolie said in an interview for The Guardian on September 4, 2021 that she fought with Pitt over that, but he still wanted Weinstein to produce the movie anyway, and Jolie said that it hurt her that Pitt was happy to work with Weinstein despite knowing he had assaulted her. Jolie never worked with Weinstein after he harassed her and avoided attending promotional events for Pitt’s ‘Killing Them Softly’.
After his separation from Jolie, Pitt hired Weinstein’s former attorney and PR fixer strategist, Matthew Hiltzik, who helped kill a New York Times’ 2004 exposé on Weinstein. Jolie has also accused Pitt of domestic violence against both her and their children.
Hollywood is a sex grooming gang, to coin a phrase, no matter how much its power players try to pretend they didn’t know exactly who Harvey Weinstein was at the height of his lengthy career.
