PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture Hear The Only Recording Of Freud’s Voice
What did Sigmund Freud sound like? We may imagine the heavily-accented, precisely-pronounced English fed to us by pop culture parodies and tributes from “Bill & Ted” to “A Dangerous Method.” While actual audio of Freud is surprisingly scarce, what little we do have seems to support the broader impressions that exist – though it comes…
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Culture Dorothy Parker’s Childhood Home To Be Demolished
Even Dorothy Parker, the queen of witty ripostes, might have had a hard time making light of this fresh hell. The West Side Rag reports that Parker’s childhood home on 72nd Street near Broadway will be demolished to make room for a 21-story retail and residential development. Parker, who would have turned 125 on August…
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Culture Watch A Clip From A New Animated Film On Oliver Sacks
Famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks is getting the cartoon treatment. On August 28, 2018, Dempsey Rice, the director of “The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks” posted a short clip of the feature-length film to her YouTube page. Over the course of a decade, Rice, a photographer and documentarian, conducted extensive interviews with Sacks, the…
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Culture 6 Surprising Ways To Use A Shofar
Being little more than a husk of keratin hacked off the head of a ram, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow horn, the burden is on the blower, who can modulate tones using his or her lips, teeth or tip-of-the tongue. For…
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Culture Serial Season 3 Will Follow Cases In Cleveland Criminal Court
Serial” first gripped listeners in 2014 (and Kim Kardashian as recently as last month) with the case of Adnan Syed, a young man convicted of murdering his high school girlfriend. The podcast’s second season, which had more mixed reviews, centered on Bowe Bergdahl, an army sergeant kidnapped by the Taliban. Now, the hit show has…
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Film & TV Meet David Fantle, Interviewer To The Golden Age Stars
40 years ago David Fantle and his writing partner, Tom Johnson, saved up enough money from their summer jobs to fly to Los Angeles for interviews with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were 18-years-old Minnesotans with no credentials other than chutzpah and a love for Golden Age cinema. They had never done anything like…
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Culture NBC Orders “Law & Order: Hate Crimes”
For all its successes, there are a couple “Law & Order” variations that have died on the vine. Who could forget — or rather, who can remember — the single season clunkers “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: Trial By Jury?” Now, Variety reports, a new riff on the old procedural formula is…
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Culture 7 Questions For Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is concerned about our bad decisions. Whereas the Oxford-educated Israeli historian and academic’s past work examined the far-flung past and the way-off future, his third book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (Spiegel & Grau), brings his insights to the here-and-now into a call to action. Harari believes that unless we heed…
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