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Tuesday, November 12, 2019

The Unmistakable Black Roots Of 'Sesame Street', by Bryan Greene, Smithsonian

Forty years ago, upon the tenth anniversary of the debut of “Sesame Street,” the New York Times offered an appraisal of the revolutionary children’s television program, reminding readers that the show with universal appeal initially declared its target audience, “the four-year old inner-city black youngster.” This year, as the show commemorates its 50th anniversary and is broadcast in more than 150 countries, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at how since its inception, “Sesame Street” has been rooted in African-American culture, more specifically the historically black community of Harlem. The New York City neighborhood played such an outsized role in the development of the program—from set design to casting and marketing—the answer to the question from the “Sesame Street” opening song, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street,” ought to be Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”

Once Upon A Tarantino, by Matt Hanson, The Smart Set

Given the discouraging fact that movies aren’t nearly as culturally important as they used to be, Quentin Tarantino is probably on the shortlist of auteurs who can still put asses in theater seats. Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers are among the very small number of contemporary filmmakers whose films everybody has to go see even if they’re not movie people. Susan Sontag used to say that being a cinephile in the ’60s meant that there was “a new masterpiece every two weeks.” Given how many movie theaters are closing and how almost all access to films comes from streaming platforms, with the built-in preference for TV shows and the joys of binging, going to a proudly cinematic Tarantino flick is almost like taking part in that long-passed era.

Amos Oz And The Politics Of The Hebrew Language, by Gal Koplewitz, New Yorker

For Oz, stories were an attempt to impose order on a world that has none—not so different, he thought, from Paleolithic cave paintings, in which prehistoric artists stilled wild beasts, giving themselves an illusion of control over nature. Still, Oz argued, the most primal human experiences transcend words: “Humans come into the world crying, make love moaning, die sighing,” he said in the 1978 interview. “When you need to communicate these things with words, it’s hard. . . . Some things get lost. You need to trust the reader, to some extent, to produce from the words that which is beyond words.” In her essay collection “Upstream,” the poet Mary Oliver observed that “Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.” A bet, as Oz put it, that different people will find beauty in the same contours.

Philip Glass Is Too Busy To Care About Legacy, by Zachary Woolfe, New York Times

But surely a composer must care, or at least wonder, about the fate of his works? Even just a little?

Mr. Glass smiled.

“I’m not going to be here,” he said.

If I Touched The Moon, What Would It Feel Like?, by Randall Munroe, New York Times

If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks.

Everyone Needs To Stop Building Giant Glass Skyscrapers Right Now, by Sophia Epstein, Wired

Any building playing host to hundreds of people is going to have a huge climate footprint, but the glass is particularly problematic. The sunlight has unlimited access into the building, but no way to get out. “With an all glass building, you’re fighting the environment rather than working with it,” says Simon Sturgis, who is an adviser to the government as well as chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group. Conventional glass skyscrapers are just tall green houses. The heat inside can’t escape because the whole structure is wrapped in a glass skin. That’s great for tomatoes, but for people it just means more air conditioning.

'Badass': The One Word That Has Become A Lightning Rod For Many Female Chefs, by Nina Martyris, NPR

Are there any words or phrases you really wish people would stop using to describe women chefs (or really, women, period)?

Charlotte Druckman put this question to over 100 female chefs and food writers for her book, Women on Food, a compendium that corrals a range of voices from marquee names like Nigella Lawson and Rachael Ray to the pioneering 92-year-old writer Betty Fussell, who still gets into the van at her retirement home in Santa Barbara, Calif., to buy raw cream and nectarines at the farmers market.

For Lydia Davis, Language Is Character, by Brian Dillon, New York Times

In the preface to this ample assembly of her essays, Lydia Davis offers a modest account of the book’s origin. “I thought it was time to collect the pieces of nonfiction I had had occasion to write over the decades and bring them together in one place.” “Occasion” is a freighted word here, for almost everything in “Essays One” is “occasional” in an old-fashioned sense: derived from an opportunity, pretext or invitation. There are tributes and introductions to some of the writers Davis has translated — Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor. There are sage and agile talks delivered to writing students at N.Y.U., crisp essays for magazines and even a lovely thesaurus entry. At their best, Davis’s essays resemble her celebrated short stories — her most recent collection is “Can’t and Won’t” (2014) — which are wryly occasional too: worked up from dreams, diaries, notebooks, letters of complaint and stray phrases from emails.

Garry Shandling’s Riotous Scrapbook, by Peter Keepnews, New York Times

A little too scattershot and light on details to qualify as either biography or oral history, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Book” is best characterized as a scrapbook. But what a scrapbook!

Hard-core fans of Garry Shandling — whose wry, dry style influenced a generation of stand-up comedians, and who helped redefine television comedy twice, by shattering the fourth wall on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” and eviscerating the talk-show business from the inside on “The Larry Sanders Show” — will not need to be told that this cornucopia of Shandlingiana is worth their time. More casual fans, while they may be intimidated by the flood of minutiae, will find it worth the plunge.