Lifestyle
Book Twitter Comes to Life
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“Asking a author how they did through the pandemic is a bit of bit like asking a cat,” Seth Meyers instructed a bunch of 600 literary luminaries Tuesday evening. “‘It was bizarre! I simply sat round, by no means went out.’”
The scene was E book Twitter incarnate: Poets & Writers, the nonprofit literary group, held a gala with what Mr. Meyers known as “a verse of poets and a espresso stain of writers” at Pier Sixty in Chelsea.
Regardless of the group’s title, most in attendance had been neither poets nor writers, however publishers, editors, brokers and nonprofit people wanting to socialize. “I received dressed up and my son stated, ‘You look bizarre!’” stated Zibby Owens, the writer of Zibby Books. “He’s seven.”
Small speak lined the standard subjects: post-quarantine states of the union (“You’re nonetheless married, that’s an excellent factor,” one non-profit staffer joked), the quirks of returning to the workplace (“All my snacks expired two years in the past,” stated Jenny Jackson, an editor at Knopf) and cats (“I left Pumpkin at house,” stated Maxine Paetro, a author).
Desk hosts included Marlon James, Leslie Jamison, Main Jackson, Jennifer Egan and Cathy Park Hong. The writer Cleyvis Natera, whose debut novel, “Neruda on the Park,” publishes in Could, was overwhelmed by the star energy. “There are such a lot of individuals I’ve admired religiously,” she stated. “I used to be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to say hello to everyone!’ But it surely’s simply good to hold again and take it in.”
Ms. Natera was a visitor of Tayari Jones, the award-winning writer of “An American Marriage,” whom she met by way of a PEN America fellowship. “This gala has all the time been for writers’ writers,” Ms. Jones stated.
Some had been keen to debate Hollywood, although nobody talked about what occurred on the Oscars. Delia Owens raved concerning the movie adaptation of her e-book, “The place the Crawdads Sing,” which she screened the earlier evening, and Jofie Ferrari-Adler, the writer of Avid Reader Press, joked about his portrayal in an upcoming TV adaptation of “Three Ladies.”
The evening honored Sonia Sanchez, Viet Thanh Nguyen, James Patterson and Sally Kim, although solely two of them attended. The household of Ms. Sanchez, 87, “prevailed upon her to remain house, reasonably than social gathering maskless with 600 associates,” Mr. Meyers stated.
And Mr. Patterson examined optimistic for Covid and accepted his award by way of a pre-recorded video. He was launched by Dolly Parton, his co-author on “Run, Rose, Run.” “I feel you’re profitable, what, the Writers for Writers Award?” Ms. Parton stated by way of video. “How good is that? Each author loves you.”
The gala had the air of a faculty reunion, with outdated associates wanting to catch up. Between programs of pickled squash salad and roast rooster, friends leapt from their seats to mingle. They continued chatting after dinner, lingering across the dessert stations 5 hours after the doorways opened.
However when it was time to say goodbye round 10:30 p.m., there have been orchids and free books to gather. “Oh gosh, tote luggage,” a bespectacled partygoer muttered lustily, making a beeline for the primary of many present tables this season.
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Lifestyle
Yes, chef: 'The Bear' has a lot going on in its third season : Pop Culture Happy Hour
![Yes, chef: 'The Bear' has a lot going on in its third season : Pop Culture Happy Hour](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2024/07/01/bear-e302_06_24_06.still003_wide-3843f32636f8864faa933351f42e2d317549a544.jpg?s=1400&c=100&f=jpeg)
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear.
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FX/Hulu
Jeremy Allen White in The Bear.
FX/Hulu
The Bear just returned for its third season and it’s still one of the most stressful and most interesting shows on TV. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) are launching their new fine dining restaurant, but he’s estranged from some of the people who are closest to him just as he sneaks up on a new level of success. The series is streaming now on Hulu.
Lifestyle
Pat Tillman Award Recipients Say Prince Harry Deserves the Honor
![Pat Tillman Award Recipients Say Prince Harry Deserves the Honor](https://imagez.tmz.com/image/f7/16by9/2024/07/01/f712e132bb104d9aa94418dfb9bff86a_xl.jpg)
Prince Harry has key figures in his corner amid the outrage over ESPN’s decision to honor him with the Pat Tillman Award for Service — at least 2 former winners say Harry is definitely deserving.
Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine and former college football player who won the award in 2018, tells TMZ … the Duke of Sussex is a natural fit for the Tillman honor because of Harry’s military service and his dedication to veterans.
Jake feels Prince Harry is a good choice because he’s dedicated his life to serving and supporting the military and veterans — Harry served 2 tours in Afghanistan — and that should be commended because there are hundreds of different ways a British royal could live his life.
Remember, Pat’s mom, Mary Tillman, set off the controversy when she slammed ESPN for its plan to give the award named after her son to “a controversial and divisive individual” at this month’s ESPY Awards ceremony.
Even ESPN personality Pat McAfee is publicly supporting Mary’s viewpoint, claiming his network is purposely trying to create a controversy … allegedly for better TV ratings.
Another previous winner, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Israel Del Toro Jr., received the Tillman award in 2017, and totally disagrees with McAfee and Mary Tillman.
He says Harry’s work with wounded and injured veterans makes him a worthy recipient, and for what it’s worth … he’s looking forward to watching Harry follow in his footsteps.
That’s ESPN’s take too, as it insists Harry was chosen specifically because of his work as the founder of The Invictus Games for wounded and injured vets. Harry’s foundation is celebrating 10 years of service.
The notion ESPN selected Harry purely for publicity doesn’t make sense to Jake, who points out … the ESPYs and ESPN aren’t hurting for celebs and the ceremony is always chock-full of famous athletes.
Of course, Harry’s the first celeb to win the Pat Tillman Award for Service — in the past, it’s been reserved for unsung heroes, but Jake says Harry’s military background makes him unlike most celebs.
While Jake’s defending Harry here, don’t get it twisted … he says Pat’s mother has every right to defend her son’s legacy however she sees fit, and, obviously, he does not speak for the Tillman family.
Likewise, Israel has sympathy for Mary, but says the award boils down to service … and, for him at least, Prince Harry more than checks that box.
Lifestyle
Why 'A Family Affair' works so well as a Netflix romcom
![Why 'A Family Affair' works so well as a Netflix romcom](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4836x2719+511+219/resize/1400/quality/100/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa2%2F5e%2F6ab9582944b2b985a4877bfb6f4c%2Fafa-20240301-10861r.jpg)
Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.
Aaron Epstein/Netflix
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Aaron Epstein/Netflix
About seven minutes into the new Netflix romantic comedy A Family Affair, Zac Efron, playing a conceited, not-too-bright movie star who’s just broken up with his girlfriend, is whining to his assistant (played by Joey King) that she needs to pick up his stuff from the ex-girlfriend’s place. He left treasured items there, he explains. He left his autographed Jordans! He left his Himalayan t-shirt! And then he says, gravely, as if it shows the urgency of the mission, “I left my copy of The Courage to be Disliked.” And I said, in my living room, “Ha!”
The Courage to be Disliked is a real book. It doesn’t actually endorse the practice of being a jerk; it’s more nuanced than that. But this character, without a pinch of self-awareness, bemoaning the disappearance of a book called The Courage to be Disliked? That’s a very solid joke, very solidly delivered by Efron. He follows it up with, “I have several underwears there. And people sell those.”
![Clockwise from top left: Industry, My Lady Jane, The Bear, The Umbrella Academy, Clipped and House of the Dragon](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1351x1350+101+0/resize/100/quality/100/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc5%2Fbe%2Fdd41899f4cdc8741c6f8af081988%2F6-images-1.jpg)
Eventually, the movie star, whose name is Chris, has one too many fights with the assistant, whose name is Zara, and he has to go find her to make amends. But when he goes to her house, he finds her mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful widowed author who lives in the kind of gorgeous and classy house that starred in most of the best Nancy Meyers movies. (It’s sharply different from Chris’ house, which is equally fancy but also ugly and impractical, as seen in an effective little bit about his absurd front door.) Brooke and Chris start drinking tequila, they hit it off, and Zara, who lives at home and observes few boundaries with her mom, eventually walks in on them upstairs in Brooke’s bedroom.
Zara’s dismay over her mother’s relationship with Chris is not about the age difference (which goes mostly undiscussed), but about the fact that she’s seen Chris go through his girlfriend-dumping routine enough times to fear that her mother might get hurt. What follows in the script from Carrie Solomon is one part romance between Chris and Brooke, one part ongoing clash between Chris and Zara, and one part mother-daughter story about Zara and Brooke. And honestly, in this film from director Richard LaGravenese, it all works pretty well!
![Joey King as Zara Ford and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/3936x2624+0+0/resize/1100/quality/50/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc4%2F7b%2F09f7e2054fdab01d873b57ae0db0%2Fafa-20220907-02637r.jpg)
Joey King as Zara Ford and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.
Tina Rowden/Netflix
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
Some of this — particularly an older woman getting involved with a younger male celebrity — may call to mind the recent movie The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway fell for a boy band member played by Nicholas Galitzine. I didn’t care for that movie at all, in part because it wasn’t funny enough, in part because the romance was unconvincing, and in part because the ending lacked emotional resonance. (It was based on a book with a completely different ending, and it turns out you can’t just take a carefully built story and flip the ending on its head and have the result make sense.) That book wasn’t written to be a romcom, but was adapted and wedged into the romcom box. This, on the other hand, is meant to be one — and it shows.
Efron is a much more successful, charismatic, and (especially) funny lead than Galitzine (whom I’d liked in Red, White & Royal Blue) opposite Hathaway in The Idea of You. And it’s refreshing to see Kidman happily making out with somebody, at least temporarily making her way out of the haunted-sad-person rut she’s been in for the past few years. Chris’ relationship with Brooke feels real and brings out nice things in them both, beginning when she explains the Icarus myth so he can understand its connections to his movie franchise, Icarus Rush, which she’s never seen. He certainly seems like a dope at first (“I’m Australian.” “Oh, do you know Margot Robbie?” “…No.” “I do.”), but as he gets comfortable, he grows on Brooke, in addition to being, you know, very hot.
All the way back in 2012, I wrote that Efron was making an interesting play to follow in the footsteps of somebody like Ryan Gosling. (At that time, in his mid-twenties, Efron was appearing in a Nicholas Sparks film.) Gosling was also once a Disney kid, and he managed to grow into a very good dramatic actor, a very good comic actor, and a very swoony romantic lead. Efron doesn’t have the Oscar nominations just yet, but he was excellent in a pure dramatic role in The Iron Claw in 2023, and he’s funny enough here as the willfully goofy hunk that he might have been a pretty terrific Ken if Gosling hadn’t been available — or a good Fall Guy.
![Romantic Comedy Guide: Irish Wish, Anyone But You, Upgraded](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2024/03/18/iw_20221004_unit_11149_r.jpg-iw_20221004_unit_11149_r_sq-ef2129b39827ac9e68403bc6b214a470984302b2.jpg?s=100&c=100&f=jpeg)
King is an established Netflix romcom lead herself, but she does a very nice job here, too. Besides the romance, particularly welcome is the strand of the story about Zara figuring out that the world is not all about her, even in her relationship with her mother. In a scene with her grandmother, played (skillfully as ever) by Kathy Bates, Zara starts to figure out what we all eventually must: Your parents are not only your parents, they are also human beings with lives and thoughts and wants that have nothing to do with you. She has a truth-telling moment with her best friend (Liza Koshy), too, about her problems not lying at the center of the universe, which gives the whole last act a very nice “What if somebody had forcefully told Rory Gilmore to get over herself?” quality.
Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood in A Family Affair.
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
It’s too early to declare some golden age of streaming romcoms, because the ones we get are still wildly uneven, and because on cable, it’s not as if they ever went away. But there’s some star power here, and some budget, and some writing and directing, that suggests interest in the genre is picking up steam and getting good results.
![Clockwise from top left: Inside Out 2, Thelma, Twisters, Hit Man, Fancy Dance and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/663x662+1681+688/resize/100/quality/100/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Feb%2Fd5%2F9c7769a34e72a85a70e98fa6bb96%2F6-images-2.jpg)
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