In the fall of 1983, Judd Apatow made his way down to a musty room in the basement of Syosset High School and stumbled upon his secret weapon—he just didn’t know it yet.
Apatow was 15 years old, deep into an infatuation with comedy, but had nowhere to channel it. Boyhood on Long Island was something like a John Hughes movie: idyllic on the outside and tormented on the inside.
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Some years ago, trying to understand what it might take to break America’s fever of political violence, I asked a former Justice Department official what she thought about the possibility of a second civil war in the United States.
Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who has spent much of her career thinking about how to combat extremism, was worried about worsening political violence.
Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.
Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.
Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.
Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.
The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it.
Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost. They’d been looping their way along an open road, past shady groves and canyons, and in doing so they’d gotten turned around. This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks.
Well, you have to hand it to them. Few constituencies are so ostentatiously and consistently wrong, over so many generations of human history, as the doomsayers who promise that the end is nigh.
It did seem kind of nigh there for a second, though, didn’t it? Or, as the writer Kurt Andersen put it in the days leading up to today’s eclipse, after a rare (and rather substantial) earthquake rattled New York City: “Earthquake. Eclipse. The antichrist running for president. Check.
There are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.The first comes from Conan O’Brien: “Albert broke the sound barrier,” the talk-show host says.
In November 1886, at a royal jubilee in honor of his 50th birthday at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu, King David Kalākaua showed off a rather remarkable object that had recently come into his possession: a smooth, oblong calabash, made of koa and kou woods and wrapped with decorative brass, known as the Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao.As legend has it, the gourd contained all of the winds of Hawaii—winds that could be summoned only by a person who knew what to chant to each one.
In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish.
How strange it is, the condition of having a body, of being a body. Consider the sponge of the marrow that makes your blood, the skeleton frame that holds in your organs, the tendons that attach your muscles to bone, the heart that pumps blood through your veins, the electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve from your retinas, the neural networks that light up the galaxies of your brain like constellations.
Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once.At 2:10 p.m.
Danielle Del Plato
In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy.Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace.
And just like that, it’s Groundhog Day. The news from the CDC is bad. Yes, we have vaccines—and they are miraculously effective at preventing serious illness and death from COVID-19. Thank goodness for that. But the CDC now says that when vaccinated people are infected, they may spread the coronavirus just as easily as the unvaccinated do. On top of that, the Delta variant is tremendously contagious, much more so than the original strain of the virus.
Donald Trump’s loyalists are fixated on Philadelphia, and its affection for Joe Biden, as the president’s reelection prospects fizzle. Ted Cruz called Philadelphia “lawless” and “the worst in the country.” Another pro-Trump pundit tweeted, “I’m going to Philly tomorrow. This is war.” The TV commentator Lou Dobbs called Philadelphia “a cesspool electorally” and said Republicans should “surround that thing.
In March, we were all living in 15-day increments. Working from home and distance learning, for those who had the terrible luxury of such things, would be a weeks-long affair, surreal but temporary. Fifteen days to flatten the curve. Fifteen days to slow the spread.Scientists warned us even then that a return to normalcy would take longer, but the telescoped timeline had obvious appeal. You can put up with almost anything for just 15 days.