Growing up, I was a voracious reader. But, to my father’s chagrin (“Read some real books!”), it wasn’t Mark Twain or even Judy Blume I gobbled up — it was fantasy. I read Harry Potter, of course, but also obscure books featuring magical knights or shape-shifting girls. As an adult, I have also learned to…
We look to spiritual leaders to guide us through challenging moments and inspire us, but where do they turn to for their own source of inspiration? Streaming services. “This past year has been hard in new ways, and when you live at your job and your job is often to help other people make it…
Holed up at a dusty ranch in Victorville, California, with a full-leg cast, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz has been self-medicating as he works his way through a draft of “Citizen Kane.” When his secretary, Rita Alexander, learns he’s sneaked booze into the guest residence, she confronts his accomplice, a German nurse. “Frieda, you mustn’t let…
Last night the Schmooze went to Manderley again … and it was a huge bummer. Before it even debuted, the Netflix reboot of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” was slated to go wrong in a lot of ways. A 1938 Gothic thriller with strong “Jane Eyre” vibes, the novel follows a naive 20-something narrator who marries…
“The Great British Baking Show” is supposed to calm you down. With its bespectacled judges and decidedly low-stakes narration — “For some bakers, bread is a new challenge” — it’s earned a reputation as a self-soother for the pandemic era. At a time when reality increasingly resembles dystopian prestige TV, “The Great British Baking Show”…
Without meaning to, “GLOW,” the Netflix dramedy set in the hairspray-hazed world of women’s pro-wrestling, had one of the most gutting finales in TV history. Warning: spoilers follow. At the end of the show’s third season, Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) runs to catch her flight home for Christmas after a months-long residence in Las Vegas….
America is launching its first mission to Mars — and there’s a chumash on the spaceship. This may sound like a Space Force PR stunt. In fact, it’s an extremely Jewish subplot of Netflix’s space soap opera “Away.” And that chumash (the Torah in printed, portable form) is the prized possession of one of its…
This weekend, my brother Jacob sent my mother and me a tweet by the writer Emery Lord, the sort of lightly despairing social media dispatch that the coronavirus has made so common: “my toddler,” Lord wrote, “yelling from the other room while I get her a snack: ‘I am LONELY and I want a BAGEL.’”…
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