Good pitching, baseball fans always say, stops good hitting. A good defense stops a good offense.
And so the Denver Broncos’ vaunted defense stopped Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers’ electric running game, 24-10 in Super Bowl 50.
It was perhaps the last hurrah for Broncos’ quarterback Peyton Manning, who at 39 became the oldest quarterback to pilot a Super Bowl team and may join his boss John Elway as the only quarterback to retire after winning a Super Bowl. ...
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Aaron Hamburger, the short story writer and novelist, begins his laudatory review of Garth Greenwell’s “rich, important” debut novel “What Belongs To You” in the Jan. 31 edition of The New York Times Book Review by indulging in a remembrance of a review past.
He recalls John Updike’s 1999 New Yorker piece on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” in which Updike – who wrote many sexy novels – complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” “What Belongs To You,” Hamburger writes, provides the “ringing” retort to Updike’s complaint.
I suspect that Updike may have been not only bored, though, but frightened and even repulsed. For gay fiction, like gay sex, presupposes the male as love object. And that might’ve been an uncomfortable exploration for the alpha male who wrote the “Rabbit” series and “The Witches of Eastwick.” ...
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As a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.
My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.
But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.
New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...
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Was it mere coincidence that Charlie Rose’s interview with Sean Penn – about his Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo – should air just as a story broke about match-fixing in tennis?
Both say much about the sorry state of journalism.
No less an authority than Penn pronounced the Fourth Estate to be in trouble. And with him netting cover assignments it’s little wonder.
For those who’ve been on planet Pluto, Penn snagged an interview with the dealer of all drug dealers – who had escaped from a Mexican prison – basically because El Chapstick was hot for some actress, Kate del Castillo, who facilitated the encounter.
For all his bluster, “60 Minutes”’ Rose failed to ask Penn two pointed questions ...
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At first glance, Carrie Fisher, a contemporary actress and author, and St. Teresa of Ávila, a 17th century philosopher, abbess and mystic, wouldn’t appear to have much in common (even though Fisher was reportedly a script doctor on “Sister Act”).
But the two both wound up in the particularly meaty Jan. 10 edition of The New York Times’ Week in Review as unwitting examples of how far women still have to go when it comes to being defined by men, particularly where their looks are concerned.
Fisher, who reprises her role as Princess Leia in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” found herself embroiled in an Internet brouhaha in which posters were unable to forgive the princess for aging – as if the Web were a particularly petulant Peter Pan. This prompted novelist Jennifer Weiner to write a piece in which she opined that we all need to let it go, including that endlessly self-improving Weight Watchers’ investor, Oprah. ...
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We continue looking back – and ahead – with the top stories covered by this blog in 2015. In the last post, I considered the top sports stories. Now I explore the top cultural events of a tumultuous year:
Pluto rising
It was the summer (OK, July) of the little planet that could as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft staged an expensive ($700 million) but profitable flyby. “Pluto, still smarting from its demotion to dwarf planet, nonetheless revealed itself to be a complex world, with a polar ice cap, rugged mountains, smooth plains, and reddish patches that recalled the surface of Mars,” Nicola Twilley writes. ...
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“Concussion” – starring Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who blew the whistle on NFL head injuries and their relationship to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of dementia – opens on Christmas Day and is already stirring the pot.
Some say it’s too easy on the NFL.
Others that the movie plays fast and loose with the events and exaggerates the relationship between football and poor health.
“Are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes?” Daniel Engber writes for Slate. ...
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