readtheprofile.com

Kevin O'Leary Is Happy Playing the Villain

Heroes are expected to be flawless. Villains are allowed to be human. Audiences may not always like them, but they remember them and connect with their flaws.

readtrung.com

Pixar's $6 Billion Lunch

In the summer of 1994, there was a lunch. Me, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, the late Joe Ranft all sat down [at the Hidden City Cafe in Point Richmond, California near Pixar's head office]. Toy Story was almost complete and we thought 'well jeez, if we're going to make another movie, we better get started now'. So at that lunch, we knocked around a bunch of ideas that eventually became A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo. The last one we talked about that day was the story of a robot named Wall-E.

honest-broker.com

The 50 Essential Western Films

I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won't learn any other way.

themarginalian.org

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”

When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power — upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane.

personalcanon.com

i used to think that novels were a waste of time

Reading a novel don't always make us more moral, for instance—although my moral intuitions have been shaped by reading about the adulterous affairs of Russian aristocrats, and the political idealism of Norwegian PR consultants. The modest claim I'll make here is that novels and films have made me a better person, through the obscure mechanisms of style and form and story, and I'll never be without them again.

themarginalian.org

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: Apple’s next CEO & the billionaire who wants to reshape Miami

Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody's life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it.

honest-broker.com

Everything You Expect Is Missing in 'Project Hail Mary'

For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.

honest-broker.com

The Strangest Book in Harvard Library

This peculiar man took ads in the newspaper, offering to hire "talkers" who would tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives. The end result was a diary with more than 1,000 characters—striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored narrative.

3quarksdaily.com

Heated Rivalry In Russia

After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.

3quarksdaily.com

You Look Good in (Morally) Grey: An Ode to Sarah J. Maas’ Rhysand

Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole.