His name might not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by millions around the world. Today, we take a journey through the life and work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist who wrote such hits as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and who put the music into The Wizard of Oz, the movie that inspired the hit Broadway musical and now Hollywood blockbuster, Wicked.
The gift of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world seem weirder, or rather to reveal the world to be as strange as it really is. He sings of life as a flow of jumbled-up signs and sensations, some real and some not, carrying meaning beyond words. Even at his most strident, he wheezes out an anti-narrative: Thou shalt not simplify, classify, categorize.
A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic focused on the bard’s early career, understands this—and betrays it.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Olmsted, S. Carniani, JADES Collaboration
Day 25 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: the most distant known galaxy. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have found a record-breaking distant galaxy observed just 290 million years after the Big Bang.
“Silent Night” is one of the most popular Christmas hymns, often sung in churches lit only by candles. The song describes a “tender and mild” infant Christ slumbering undisturbed in “heavenly peace.” Another beloved hymn, “Away in a Manger,” also focuses on the theme of divine serenity: It speaks of animals making noises but the child Christ being different. “The cattle are lowing,” goes one verse. “The baby awakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.
The story behind the Swedish start-up’s ambitious rise and massive downfall
If you ask a Bogotáno where they learned to ride a bike, they all have the same answer.
Credit cards make sports betting dangerously easy—but they also come with hidden fees and risks that sportsbooks won’t tell you about.
The move, welcomed by conservative organizations, leaves in place a Trump rule allowing more employers to opt out of providing coverage.
Republican lawmakers are looking past Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views as they consider his nomination to lead HHS.
Public health officials see promise in some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to prevent chronic disease but despair at his vaccine conspiracy theories.
Trump’s pick to lead HHS heads to the Hill this week.
A witness recognized the alleged killer at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Miran has called for a sweeping overhaul of the Fed to ensure greater political control over the central bank, including giving the president the power to fire board members at will.
Five weeks after the election, the president took his sharpest swing at Trump’s policy plans.
A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
The final paid messages: Economy, culture wars and character.
Harris has ratcheted up her warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term in recent weeks.
Christmas celebrations are canceled in the West Bank and the city of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ’s birthplace, for the second year in a row in response to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Cinematic history has long been lousy with Draculas: Dozens of remakes, sequels, and spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel have graced the screen over the years. But F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a rarer breed. The 1922 German expressionist film cribbed the plot of Stoker’s Dracula (with some alterations) and created the first horror-movie masterpiece, conjuring a unique take on one of the genre’s hoariest texts.
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Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power.
Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Dear James,
I’m typically quiet and mind my own business. But in recent weeks, I’ve been having conflicts with people over minor things. Just today, I got yelled at twice.
ESA / Webb, NASA and CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani
Day 24 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: an energetic stellar nursery. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope features the young star cluster NGC 602, surrounded by the varied clouds of a nebula, near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years from Earth.
My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.
Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode.
