hey if you're feeling mentally all over the place it's nice to read a book

SHAKESPEARE'S MARGARET | Kirkus Reviews Step aside, m’lords.

SHAKESPEARE'S MARGARET has a new review, and it begins with "Step aside, m'lords" which is all I could really ask for!

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

‘Go Out and Sue a Polluter’ | Scott W. Stern Shortly before Christmas in 1969 a dense fog rolled in across the bayous of the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than four days it blanketed a vast region, as

The story of the 1970s anti-pollution crusader Rex Braun, writes Scott W. Stern, helps “return us to a Texas in which populist environmentalism was imaginable.”

new from @scottwstern.bsky.social on the origins of environmental justice in texas for @nybooks.com

horrible news. i am drinking out of my yiddish book center mug right now. the humanities in the united states are in a dire place, and if we don't change course we will lose them entirely.

The Historian Who Wants to Imagine an Alternative to Capitalism Trevor Jackson traces the “dumb, inhuman logic” of endless growth over hundreds of years, and gestures at a better world.

Check out my latest in @newrepublic.com, wherein I review a brilliant, shockingly svelte history of capitalism (out now from
@wwnorton.com)!

Thanks, as always, to @lauramarsh.bsky.social for the incisive edits! newrepublic.com/article/2088...

Amsterdam celebrates 25 years since the world's first same-sex weddings Amsterdam is marking 25 years since the world's first gay marriages were celebrated in the Netherlands.

Today marks a quarter century of same-sex marriage, and the sky has not fallen, children are still born, and capitalism endures

apnews.com/article/gay-...

Oakland and the Ghosts of Urbicide A specter of Blackness haunts Oakland, California, lingering palpably in cultural and material landscapes that have been shaped by generations of Black Oaklanders.

Incredible piece about Oakland and the legacies of urban renewal and gentrification by @drbrandi.bsky.social

placesjournal.org/article/oakl...

i mean one must assume that everyone on the second line is voicing a sheep.

the second casting oscar goes to:

i have a problem. and it's been going on since 2015.

Charles O’Malley and @scottwstern.bsky.social had such a great idea for a book! Can’t wait to dive in.

Justice for The Way We Were, a flawless weepie romance that's also a shrewd look at the way history can impact individual lives.

truly everyone at the oscars got the brooch memo!? thrilled for my mother-in-law and all the other moms out there

sometimes i plant something in my yard and it dies immediately. sometimes i plant something and it flourishes.

but i really love it when a plant does absolutely nothing for three years then suddenly doubles in size in a month. it was just waiting till it was ready! a literal late bloomer!

It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”

The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.

very much this. i wrote a book about it! 😆

Todd Haynes + The Well of Loneliness

@scottwstern.bsky.social @wwnorton.com

Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of A Warrior Queen by undefined Theater critic O’Malley (editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance) and lawyer Stern (The Trials of Nina McCall) assemble ...

SHAKESPEARE'S MARGARET has its first review, from @publisherswkly.bsky.social!!!

"O’Malley and Stern ingeniously probe the sweep of Shakespearean history ... The result is a fascinating biography of a singular character and a revealing commentary on theater’s power to evolve with the times."

selina: you don't go to prison for not being the head of the IMF.
minna: just the prison of unmet potential!

there are few joys in this world as pure as choosing an episode of veep at random just to realize it is a minna häkkinen episode

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

AND @coyotemedia.org how could i forget !!

these places won't stick around if we don't SUPPORT THEM !!

in just the past few years, the bay area has welcomed three fantastic new outlets: @oaklandside.org @oaklandreviewofbooks.org AND @bayareacurrent.bsky.social

they are wonderful and we should support them !!

We need to find a way to tell the youths about alt-weeklies so they restart them

the oscar nominations make me really miss old twitter. those were they days.

Someone said to me, "I'm sorry but I got your book from a library." Nobody should ever apologise for that. You read my book! That's brilliant! I grew up hanging out in libraries and the idea of a world without them fills me with dread. Without libraries, authors, like readers, will only suffer.

Shakespeare's Margaret Shakespeare's most powerful female character, her historical inspiration, and her reinventions in performance through the centuries., Shakespeare's Margaret, The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen, Char...

wwnorton.com/books/978132...