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If you turn to children's fiction, you can, I think, find what endures of us when all our adult compromises and poses are stripped away. You can, I think, find the very meat of the human heart.

Book of the Day
3h ago

I didn't want to play Tasty in the beginning. Why not? You know, because she was an inmate and because I was nervous coming out of Juilliard, 21 years old, like, oh my gosh, I'm about to play an inmate and what is that, you know, saying about Black women, you know, what viewpoint am I putting out about Black women?

1d ago

I just keep doing that with my books. my characters are getting older along with me. I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a rich inner life. They're still people, still have relationships. And things still matter. They're not just sort of blobs.

1w ago

What I wanted was to do a story about an ordinary person, an ordinary farmer, caught up in tumultuous events, events that would feel, I think, although it's set in the medieval world, would feel very familiar to an audience today, because I think in many ways, when you think of the turbulence in our world today, it is driven by these great inequalities and the rage that people feel about elites and all those things that wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think we recognise that that's what's going on in your country and mine and Europe and beyond.

1w ago

And his first note and recurring note to me is yes, that's great, it's very funny, now let's make it true. And I think that's his great gift to this material is that he's given it a great big sort of beating Arthurian heart. And that's an extra dimension that you just sort of don't expect.

2w ago

We explore how Dolly took the centuries-old tradition of the Appalachian "murder ballad"—an oral tradition of men singing songs about brutally killing women—and flipped the script, singing from the woman's point of view.

2w ago
Radiolab
Patient Zero

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds.

3w ago

In journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren't going anywhere. The need for high-quality insight isn't going anywhere. Great reporters aren't going anywhere. What surface this all lives on is up for grabs, and you can't be too ideological about that.

4w ago

I think so many movies, and obviously especially horror movies, 'if we don't have a jump scare every minute and a half, the audience will revolt' is the popular line of thinking. And I wanted this movie to have this very clear tonal line in the sand that said, no, you, I want you to feel like this movie can become anything — but the one thing that it will be is romantic, unexpected and joyful.

4w ago

People say that they don't like road trip books. And I thought about why that might be and I do get it and I think it's because you can't use minor characters in the same way that you can in other books and you also can't like place is hard cuz you're moving from place to place. So, every place has to make a big impression. Every character has to be very clear who they are in their your first interaction with them.

1mo ago

I was really interested in having our antagonist be somebody who is younger than Peter, who really represents, in many ways, what young people are going through right now, what young people are feeling. This is a character who can literally jump into other people's minds and experience the lives of other people. But she's also a person who is completely alone in this city, and nobody really knows the real her, you know.

1mo ago

We often get confused. We imagine that the thing that connects us is like our skin color, our complexion, our culture, our profession. But but it's not. It's the ability to be touched by a story.

1mo ago

Is the problem with New York that every last inch of it has already been chronicled? Have we exhausted all the encounters in parks decked out in golden leaves or swayed in snow? New York has spent decades acting as itself, serving as set and protagonist for love affairs, mysteries, dirty deals, and thwarted dreams.

1mo ago

I can't think of any other movie or TV show that has had a relationship like this one. It just is so nuanced and so deep and so, but also has been fraught with a lot of pain. I mean, that relationship was, it was mother-daughter, it was best friend, it was enemies for a while, it was respectful co-workers.

1mo ago

Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone.

1mo ago

I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?

1mo ago

I went to the library and I looked everywhere and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer.

1mo ago

What she found was a story about grief, anger, and the line where journalism ends and protest begins.

1mo ago

I love opportunities to turn my back on the audience. I love to sort of take it too far to try to push myself to a place or push the audience to a place where they can no longer be with this character, but then try to win them back through showing the fragility of their heart, showing how brokenhearted they are, showing how much pain they have, because I do think pain is a real adhesive. And I think it's the thing that really connects all of us.

1mo ago

It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

1mo ago

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days?

1mo ago

The the joy to me the great pleasure and joy of fashion is that it actually is much more present in our lives than art is. You know, I think to to see art, one has to seek it out. But, you know, when you're walking down the street, you can see so much information and create these beautiful narratives in your mind by seeing what other people are wearing.

2mo ago

The Bear billed itself and still does as a comedy and has won all its Emmys in that category. But to me, watching The Bear is as tense as watching The Pit, and that's not a casually chosen reference.

2mo ago

The brilliant insight of the PDF was, nobody cares about the operating history of a company, they care about the story of the company. And the story of the company is best told in a document that you control, that you craft, that has beautiful graphics and beautiful fonts and compelling narrative.

2mo ago

I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.

2mo ago

Ego, pride, wrath, fear, gods, superheroes, mortals, and lots of killing. Welcome to Homer's Iliad, which reads at times like a script for a Tarantino film or the latest installment of the Avengers franchise.

2mo ago
TED Radio Hour
The state of fashion

This is maximalism. Not only is it layer upon layer aesthetically, it's idea on top of idea conceptually. It becomes its own story almost, that you can almost read like a book.

2mo ago

I think that when I saw that movie for the first time, and I had a Lionel electric train set, and by actually crashing the train into things and watching the train derail and watching the passenger cars and a couple of boxcars and a caboose pile up, I was able to, I think intuitively, wrest back control of my fear. And I really think it helped assuage the fear. It helped me get in total control over it. So I was the one causing something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people but no longer myself.

2mo ago

What I loved about jellyfish is they kind of resist all efforts to see ourselves in them. You look at a jellyfish and have to ask yourself, "Where is its mouth? Where are its eyes?" And I think that makes something a very good candidate for a monster, because what is a monster if something that we can't relate to and can't see ourselves in at all.

2mo ago

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