Podcasts about Vanities

Beth Broderick is a thirty -plus year veteran of stage and screen as well as a writer, model and chef. She is widely known for her portrayal of Aunt Zelda in the long running hit TV series “Sabrina the teenage Witch”. Beth has appeared in over forty seven feature and made for television films including the “The Merry Gentlemen” which recently debuted at No. 1 on NETFLIX and “Holiday Mismatch” a new Hallmark hit. Others include: “Bonfire of the Vanities”, “Stealing Home”, “Psycho Beach Party”, “Christmas Town”, “When I Think of Christmas”, “Revenge of the Bridesmaids” and many others as well the soon to be released Hulu feature, “The Nana Project”. She recently completed filming on “The Prince”. She has also starred in numerous series such as “Heart's Afire”, “Glory Days”, The Five Mrs. Buchanans” and has been a featured recurring character on “Lost” “Under the Dome” “Love and Death” and many others. Beth has an extensive background in fundraising and community outreach. She has was the co-founder of MOMENTUM a program for persons with AIDS in 1985 and has been working with the Good Shepherd Home for women in Los Angeles for over 34 years. She is a major advocate for Los Angeles Metro and was recently featured as keynote speaker for the “On the Move” convention. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of “The Realm Company”. Beth also writes a column on SUBSTACK which boasts over 5 thousand subscribers. “Wit and Wisdom for the Ages from the Aged”. She is a dedicated home cook who also loves to travel and experience new cultures and cuisines. We chat about her love of cooking, recently becoming a model, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The profound experiences from working as an AIDS activist, grief, ego, rejection & moving forward, Substack articles, ageism (thriving with age), graduating early (basically being a genius) + plenty more! Check Beth out on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethabroderick/ Substack: https://substack.com/@bethbroderick Twitter / X: https://x.com/BethBroderick ------------------------------------------- Follow @Funny in Failure on Instagram and Facebook https://www.instagram.com/funnyinfailure/ https://www.facebook.com/funnyinfailure/ and @Michael_Kahan on Insta & Twitter to keep up to date with the latest info. https://www.instagram.com/michael_kahan/ https://twitter.com/Michael_Kahan

The book of Ecclesiastes is dark and brooding, clearly from the mind of a depressed and jaded person. In this message, I look at the context of this book, when it was written, and by whom. When compared with the other writings of King Solomon, it presents an interesting and sad picture of the old, …

Larry and I discuss justifying camera moves, working with the extras, GoodFellas, Raising Cain, working with Martin Scorcese and Brian DePalma and so much more. Larry's Amazing IMDB Larry's Website Check out Larry's Breakdowns of shots from Carlitos Way, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Raising Cain For more links, pics and videos, check out the page for this episode on The Op. Please check us out on the web and instagram and like us if you enjoyed the episode. Theme Music - Tatyana Richaud Theme Mix - Charles Papert

Today's guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein's show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city's leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I've included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I've somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It's caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they're called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don't like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City's first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins's approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an arrest, process at the local precinct, search him in front of a desk officer, print him, and then they would have to get a radio car off patrol to drive you down to central booking at 100 Centre Street [New York City Criminal Court]. Then they would fingerprint him. They didn't have the live scan fingerprints machine, it was all ink. It had to be faxed up to Albany and the FBI to see if it hit on any warrant federally and for positive identification of the person. Sometimes it took 12 hours to have the prints come back and the perp would be remanded until that time. Then you'd have to wait for the prosecutor to get their act together and to review all the paperwork. You couldn't consider bail unless the prints came back either positive or negative and then you would have that initial arraignment and the cop could then go home. There are a lot of moving parts, and they moved at a glacial pace.The system often doesn't work 24/7. A lot of this has changed, but some of it was having to wait until 9 am for people to show up to go to work, because it's not a single system. The courts, the jails, and policing all march to their own drummer, and that created a level of inefficiency.So much of the nitty-gritty of what cops actually do is boring, behind-the-scenes stuff: How do we speed up the paperwork? Can we group prisoners together? Can we do some of this at the police station instead of taking it downtown? Is all of this necessary? Can we cooperate with the various prosecutors? There are five different prosecutors in New York City, one for each borough.There's not a great incentive to streamline this. Cops enjoyed the overtime. That's one of the reasons they would make arrests. So during this time, if a cop makes an arrest for drug dealing, that cop is gone and no cop was there to replace him. If it's a minor arrest, there's a good chance in the long run charges will be dropped anyway. And you're taking cops off the street. In that sense, it's lose-lose. But, you have to think, “What's the alternative?”Bob Davin is a fascinating guy. There's a famous picture from 1981 by Martha Cooper of two cops on a subway train. It's graffitied up and they're in their leather jackets and look like cops from the ‘70s. Martha Cooper graciously gave me permission to use the picture, but she said, "You have to indemnify me because I don't have a release form. I don't know who the cops are." I said, "Martha, I do know who the cop is, because he's in my book and he loves the picture.” Bob Davin is the cop on the right.Davin says that things started to get more efficient. They had hub sites in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, so precincts in the north of Manhattan could bring their prisoners there, and you wouldn't have to take a car out of service to go back to Central Booking and deal with traffic. They started collecting prisoners and bringing them en masse on a small school bus, and that would cut into overtime. Then moving to electronic scan fingerprints drastically saves time waiting for those to come back.These improvements were made, but some of them involve collective bargaining with unions, to limit overtime and arrests that are made for the pure purpose of overtime. You want cops making arrests for the right reason and not simply to make money. But boy, there was a lot of money made in arrests.In 1991, you have the infamous Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. Racial tensions kick off. It's a nightmare for the mayor, there's this sense that he has lost control. The following year, you have this infamous police protest at City Hall where it becomes clear the relationship between the cops and the mayor has totally evaporated. How does all that play into the mayoral race between Dinkins and Giuliani?It was unintentional, but a lot of the blame for Crown Heights falls on the police department. The part of the story that is better known is that there was a procession for a Hasidic rabbi that was led by a police car. He would go to his wife's grave, and he got a little three-car motorcade. At some point, the police look at this and go "Why are we doing this? We're going to change it." The man who made the deal said ‘I"m retiring in a couple weeks, can we just leave it till then? Because I gave him my word." They're like, "Alright, whatever."This motor car procession is then involved in a car crash, and a young child named Gavin Cato is killed, and another girl is severely injured. The volunteer, Jewish-run ambulance shows up and decides they don't have the equipment: they call for a professional city ambulance. Once that ambulance is on the way, they take the mildly-injured Jewish people to the hospital. The rumor starts that the Jewish ambulance abandoned the black children to die.This isn't the first incident. There's long been strife over property and who the landlord is. But this was the spark that set off riots. A young Jewish man was randomly attacked on the street and was killed.As an aside, he also shouldn't have died, but at the hospital they missed internal bleeding.Meanwhile, the police department has no real leadership at the time. One chief is going to retire, another is on vacation, a third doesn't know what he's doing, and basically everyone is afraid to do anything. So police do nothing. They pull back, and you have three days of very anti-Semitic riots. Crowds chanting "Kill the Jews" and marching on the Lubavitch Hasidic Headquarters. Al Sharpton shows up. The riots are blamed on Dinkins, which is partly fair, but a lot of that's on the NYPD. Finally, the mayor and the police commissioner go to see what's going on and they get attacked. It's the only time in New York City history that there's ever been an emergency call from the police commissioner's car. People are throwing rocks at it.It took three days to realise this, but that's when they say “We have to do something here,” and they gather a group of officers who later become many of Bratton's main chiefs at the time [Bill Bratton was Commissioner of the NYPD from 1994-1996, under Giuliani]: Mike Julian, Louis Anemone, Ray Kelly, and [John] Timoney. They end the unrest in a day. They allow people to march, they get the police department to set rules. It still goes on for a bit, but no one gets hurt after that, and that's it.It was a huge, national story at the time, but a lot of the details were not covered. Reporters were taken from their car and beaten and stripped. The significance was downplayed at the time, especially by the New York Times, I would say.That's followed by the Washington Heights riots, which is a different story. A drug dealer was shot and killed by cops. There were rumors, which were proven to be false, that he was executed and unarmed. Then there were three days of rioting there. It wasn't quite as severe, but 53 cops were hurt, 120 stores were set on fire, and Mayor Dinkins paid for the victim's family to go to the Dominican Republic for the funeral. The police perspective again was, “You're picking the wrong side here.”Then there's the so-called Police Riot at City Hall. Nominally, it was about the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and setting up an accountability mechanism to control cops. But really it was just an anti-Dinkins protest. It was drunken and unruly. The cops stormed the steps of City Hall. I have the account of one of the cops who was on the top of those steps looking at this mob of cops storming to him, and he's getting worried he's going to be killed in a crush. There were racist chants from off-duty cops in the crowd. It did not reflect well on police officers. But it showed this hatred of David Dinkins, who was seen as siding with criminals and being anti-police. The irony is that Dinkins is the one who ends up hiring all the cops that Giuliani gets credit for.In the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program?Yes. That was because a white tourist, Brian Watkins, was killed in a subway station protecting his parents who were getting robbed. That led to the famous headline [in the New York Post] of “Dave, do something! Crime-ravaged city cries out for help.” He, with City Council President Peter Vallone, Sr., drafted and pushed through this massive hiring of police officers, “Safe Streets, Safe City.”The hiring wasn't fast-tracked. It might be because Dinkins's people didn't really want more cops. But it was a Dinkins push that got a massive hiring of cops. When the first huge class of police officers graduated, Bill Bratton was there and not David Dinkins.Some interviewees in your book talk about how there's physically not enough room in the police academies at this time, so they have to run classes 24/7. You cycle cohorts in and out of the same classroom, because there are too many new cops for the facilities.You have thousands of cops going through it at once. Everyone describes it as quite a chaotic scene. But it would have been hard to do what the NYPD did without those cops. Ray Kelly, who was police commissioner under Dinkins at the end [from 1992 to 1994] before he became police commissioner for 12 years under Bloomberg [from 2002 to 2013] probably could have done something with those cops too, but he never had the chance, because the mayoral leadership at the time was much more limiting in what they wanted cops to do.Crime starts declining slowly in the first few years of the ‘90s under Dinkins, and then in ‘93 Giuliani wins a squeaker of a mayoral election against Dinkins.One of the major issues was the then-notorious “squeegee men” of New York City. These were guys who would go to cars stopped at bridges and tunnel entrances and would rub a squeegee over the windshield asking for money. It was unpleasant, intimidating, and unwanted, and it was seen as one of those things that were just inevitable. Like graffiti on the subway in the ‘80s. Nothing we can do about it because these poor people don't have jobs or housing or whatever.The irony is that Bratton and Giuliani were happy to take credit for that, and it was an issue in the mayoral campaign, but it was solved under David Dinkins and Ray Kelly and Mike Julian with the help of George Kelling [who, with James Wilson, came up with broken windows theory]. But they never got credit for it. One wonders if, had they done that just a few months earlier, it would have shifted the entire campaign and we'd have a different course of history in New York City.It's a great example of a couple of things that several people in your book talk about. One is that disorder is often caused by a very small set of individuals. There's only like 70 squeegee men, yet everybody sees them, because they're posted up at the main tunnel and bridge entrances to Manhattan. And getting them off the streets solves the problem entirely.Another emphasis in the book is how perceptions of crime are central. You quote Jack Maple, the father of Compstat, as saying, “A murder on the subway counts as a multiple murder up on the street, because everybody feels like that's their subway.” The particular locations of crimes really affect public perception.Absolutely. Perception is reality for a lot of these things, because most people aren't victimized by crime. But when people perceive that no one is in control they feel less safe. It's not that this perception is false, it just might not be directly related to an actual criminal act.The other thing I try to show is that it's not just saying, “We've got to get rid of squeegee men. How do you do it?” They had tried before, but this is why you need smart cops and good leadership, because it's a problem-solving technique, and the way to get rid of graffiti is different to the way you get rid of squeegee men.This book is in opposition to those who just say, “We can't police our way out of this problem.” No, we can. We can't police our way out of every problem. But if you define the problem as, we don't want people at intersections with squeegees, of course we can police our way out of the problem, using legal constitutional tools. You need the political will. And then the hard work starts, because you have to figure out how to actually do it.Will you describe how they tackle the squeegee men problem?Mike Julian was behind it. They hired George Kelling, who's known for broken windows. They said, “These people are here to make money. So to just go there and make a few arrests isn't going to solve the problem.” First of all, he had to figure out what legal authority [to use], and he used Traffic Reg 44 [which prohibits pedestrians from soliciting vehicle occupants]. He talked to Norm Siegel of the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] about this, who did not want this crackdown to happen. But Norman said, “Okay, this is the law, I can't fight that one. You're doing it legally. It's all in the books.” And So that took away that opposition.But the relentless part of it is key. First they filmed people. Then, when it came to enforcement, they warned people. Then they cited people, and anybody that was left they arrested. They did not have to arrest many people, because the key is they did this every four hours. It was that that changed behavior, because even a simple arrest isn't going to necessarily deter someone if it's a productive way to make money. But being out there every four hours for a couple of weeks or months was enough to get people to do something else. What that something else is, we still don't know, but we solved the squeegee problem.So in 93, Giuliani is elected by something like 50,000 votes overall. Just as an aside, in Prince of the City, Fred Siegel describes something I had no idea about. There's a Puerto Rican Democratic Councilman who flips and supports Giuliani. Mayor Eric Adams, who at the time was the head of a nonprofit for black men in law enforcement, calls him a race traitor for doing that and for being married to a white woman. There was a remarkable level of racial vitriol in that race that I totally missed.10 years ago when I started this, I asked if I could interview then-Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, and he said yes, and the interview kept getting rescheduled, and I said, “Eh, I don't need him.” It's a regret of mine. I should have pursued that, but coulda, woulda, shoulda.Giuliani is elected, and he campaigns very explicitly on a reducing crime and disorder platform. And he hires Bill Bratton. Tell me about Bratton coming on board as NYPD commissioner.Bratton grew up in Boston, was a police officer there, became head of the New York City Transit Police when that was a separate police department. Right before he becomes NYPD Commissioner, he's back in Boston, as the Chief of Police there, and there is a movement among certain people to get Bratton the NYC job. They succeed in that, and Bratton is a very confident man. He very much took a broken windows approach and said, “We are going to focus on crime.” He has a right-hand man by the name of Jack Maple who he knows from the Transit Police. Maple is just a lieutenant in transit, and Bratton makes him the de facto number two man in the police department.Jack Maple passed away in 2001 and I didn't know what I was going to do, because it's hard to interview a man who's no longer alive. Chris Mitchell co-wrote Jack Maple's autobiography called Crime Fighter and he graciously gave me all the micro-cassettes of the original interviews he conducted with Maple around 1998. Everyone has a Jack Maple story. He's probably the most important character in Back from the Brink.Jack Maple comes in, no one really knows who he is, no one respects him because he was just a lieutenant in Transit. He goes around and asks a basic question — this is 1994 — he says, “How many people were shot in New York City in 1993?” And nobody knows. That is the state of crime-fighting in New York City before this era. There might have been 7,000 people shot in New York City in 1990 and we just don't know, even to this day.One citation from your book: in 1993, an average of 16 people were shot every day. Which is just remarkable.And remember, shootings have been declining for two or three years before that! But nobody knew, because they weren't keeping track of shootings, because it's not one of the FBI Uniform Crime Report [which tracks crime data nationally] index crimes. But wouldn't you be curious? It took Jack Maple to be curious, so he made people count, and it was findable, but you had to go through every aggravated assault and see if a gun was involved. You had to go through every murder from the previous year and see if it was a shooting. He did this. So we only have shooting data in New York City going back to 1993. It's just a simple process of caring.The super-short version of Back from the Brink is it was a change in mission statement: “We're going to care about crime.” Because they hadn't before. They cared about corruption, racial unrest, brutality, and scandal. They cared about the clearance rate for robbery a bit. You were supposed to make three arrests for every ten robberies. It didn't matter so much that you were stopping a pattern or arresting the right person, as long as you had three arrests for every ten reported crimes, that was fine.This is a story about people who cared. They're from this city — Bratton wasn't, but most of the rest are. They understood the trauma of violence and the fact that people with families were afraid to go outside, and nobody in the power structure seemed to care. So they made the NYPD care about this. Suddenly, the mid-level police executives, the precinct commanders, had to care. and the meetings weren't about keeping overtime down, instead they were about ”What are you doing to stop this shooting?”Tell listeners a little bit more about Jack Maple, because he's a remarkable character, and folks may not know what a kook he was.I think he was a little less kooky than he liked to present. His public persona was wearing a snazzy cat and spats and dressing like a fictional cartoon detective from his own mind, but he's a working-class guy from Queens who becomes a transit cop.When Bratton takes over, he writes a letter up the chain of command saying this is what we should do. Bratton read it and said, “This guy is smart.” Listening to 80 hours of Jack Maple, everyone correctly says he was a smart guy, but he had a very working-class demeanor and took to the elite lifestyle. He loved hanging out and getting fancy drinks at the Plaza Hotel. He was the idea man of the NYPD. Everyone has a Jack Maple imitation. “You're talking to the Jackster,” he'd say. He had smart people working under him who were supportive of this. But it was very much trying to figure out as they went along, because the city doesn't stop nor does it sleep.He was a bulls***er, but he's the one who came up with the basic outline of the strategy of crime reduction in New York City. He famously wrote it on a napkin at Elaine's, and it said, “First, we need to gather accurate and timely intelligence.” And that was, in essence, CompStat. “Then, we need to deploy our cops to where they need to be.” That was a big thing. He found out that cops weren't working: specialized units weren't working weekends and nights when the actual crime was happening. They had their excuses, but basically they wanted a cushy schedule. He changed that. Then, of course, you have to figure out what you're doing, what the effective tactics are. Then, constant follow up and assessment.You can't give up. You can't say “Problem solved.” A lot of people say it wasn't so much if your plan didn't work, you just needed a Plan B. It was the idea that throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What are you going to do?” that became notoriously unacceptable under Chief Anemone's stern demeanor at CompStat. These were not pleasant meetings. Those are the meetings that both propagated policies that work and held officers accountable. There was some humiliation going on, so CompStat was feared.Lots of folks hear CompStat and think about better tracking of crime locations and incidents. But as you flesh out, the meat on the bones of CompStat was this relentless follow-up. You'd have these weekly meetings early in the morning with all the precinct heads. There were relentless asks from the bosses, “What's going on in your district or in your precinct? Can you explain why this is happening? What are you doing to get these numbers down?” And follow-ups the following week or month. It was constant.CompStat is often thought of as high-tech computer stuff. It wasn't. There was nothing that couldn't have been done with old overhead projectors. It's just that no one had done it before. Billy Gorta says it's a glorified accountability system at a time when nobody knew anything about computers. Everyone now has access to crime maps on a computer. It was about actually gathering accurate, timely data.Bratton was very concerned that these numbers had to be right. It was getting everyone in the same room and saying, “This is what our focus is going to be now.” And getting people to care about crime victims, especially when those crime victims might be unsympathetic because of their demeanor, criminal activity, or a long arrest record. “We're going to care about every shooting, we're going to care about every murder.”Part of it was cracking down on illegal guns. There were hundreds of tactics. The federal prosecutors also played a key role. It was getting this cooperation. Once it started working and Giuliani made it a major part of claiming success as mayor, suddenly everyone wanted to be part of this, and you had other city agencies trying to figure it out. So it was a very positive feedback loop, once it was seen as a success.When Bratton came on the job, he said, “I'm going to bring down crime 15%.” No police commissioner had ever said that before. In the history of policing before 1994, no police commissioner ever promised a double-digit reduction in crime or even talked about it. People said “That's crazy.” It was done, and then year after year. That's the type of confidence that they had. They were surprised it worked as well as it did, but they all had the sense that there's a new captain on this ship, and we're trying new things. It was an age of ideas and experiment.And it was a very short time.That's the other thing that surprised me. Giuliani fired Bratton in the middle of ‘96.It's remarkable. Bratton comes in ‘94, and August 1994 is where you see crime drop off a cliff. You have this massive beginning of the reduction that continues.That inflection point is important for historical knowledge. I don't address alternatives that other people have proposed [to explain the fall in crime] — For example, the reduction in lead [in gasoline, paint, and water pipes] or legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade [proposed by Stephen Dubner].Reasonable people can differ. Back from the Brink focuses on the police part of the equation. Today, almost nobody, except for a few academics, says that police had nothing to do with the crime drop. That August inflection is key, because there is nothing in a lagged time analysis going back 20 years that is going to say that is the magic month where things happened. Yet if you look at what happened in CompStat, that's the month they started getting individual officer data, and noticing that most cops made zero arrests, and said, “Let's get them in the game as well.” And that seemed to be the key; that's when crime fell off the table. The meetings started in April, I believe, but August is really when the massive crime drop began.To your point about the confidence that crime could be driven down double digits year over year, there's a great quote you have from Jack Maple, where he says to a fellow cop, “This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as we have absolute control, we can absolutely drive this number into the floor.”One detail I enjoyed was that Jack Maple, when he was a transit cop, would camp out under a big refrigerator box with little holes cut out for eyes and sit on the subway platform waiting for crooks.For people who are interested in Jack Maple, it is worth reading his autobiography, Crime Fighter. Mike Daly wrote New York's Finest, which uses the same tapes that I had access to, and he is much more focused on that. He's actually the godfather of Jack Maple's son, who is currently a New York City police officer. But Maple and co were confident, and it turned out they were right.As well as having changes in tactics and approach and accountability across the NYPD, you also have a series of specific location cleanups. You have a specific initiative focused on the Port Authority, which is a cesspool at the time, an initiative in Times Square, the Bryant Park cleanup, and then Giuliani also focuses on organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market, and this open-air market in Harlem.I was struck that there was both this general accountability push in the NYPD through CompStat, and a relentless focus on cleaning up individual places that were hubs of disorder.I'm not certain the crime drop would have happened without reclamation of public spaces and business improvement districts. Bryant Park's a fascinating story because Dan Biederman, who heads the Corporation, said, “People just thought it was like a lost cause, this park can't be saved. The city is in a spiral of decline.” He uses Jane Jacobs' “eyes on the street” theory and then George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's broken windows theory. The park has money — not city money, but from local property owners — and it reopens in 1991 to great acclaim and is still a fabulous place to be. It showed for the first time that public space was worth saving and could be saved. New York City at the time needed that lesson. It's interesting that today, Bryant Park has no permanent police presence and less crime. Back in the ‘80s, Bryant Park had an active police presence and a lot more crime.The first class I ever taught when I started at John Jay College in 2004, I was talking about broken windows. A student in the class named Jeff Marshall, who is in my book, told me about Operation Alternatives at the Port Authority. He had been a Port Authority police officer at the time, and I had not heard of this. People are just unaware of this part of history. It very much has lessons for today, because in policing often there's nothing new under the sun. It's just repackaged, dusted off, and done again. The issue was, how do we make the Port Authority safe for passengers? How do we both help and get rid of people living in the bus terminal? It's a semi-public space, so it makes it difficult. There was a social services element about it, that was Operational Alternatives. A lot of people took advantage of that and got help. But the flip side was, you don't have to take services, but you can't stay here.I interviewed the manager of the bus terminal. He was so proud of what he did. He's a bureaucrat, a high-ranking one, but a port authority manager. He came from the George Washington Bridge, which he loved. And he wonders, what the hell am I going to do with this bus terminal? But the Port Authority cared, because they're a huge organization and that's the only thing with their name on it — They also control JFK Airport and bridges and tunnels and all the airports, but people call the bus terminal Port Authority.They gave him almost unlimited money and power and said, “Fix it please, do what you've got to do,” and he did. It was environmental design, giving police overtime so they'd be part of this, a big part of it was having a social service element so it wasn't just kicking people out with nowhere to go.Some of it was also setting up rules. This also helped Bratton in the subway, because this happened at the same time. The court ruled that you can enforce certain rules in the semi-public spaces. It was not clear until this moment whether it was constitutional or not. To be specific, you have a constitutional right to beg on the street, but you do not have a constitutional right to beg on the subway. That came down to a court decision. Had that not happened, I don't know if in the long run the crime drop would have happened.That court decision comes down to the specific point that it's not a free-speech right on the subway to panhandle, because people can't leave, because you've got them trapped in that space.You can't cross the street to get away from it. But it also recognized that it wasn't pure begging, that there was a gray area between aggressive begging and extortion and robbery.You note that in the early 1990s, one-third of subway commuters said they consciously avoided certain stations because of safety, and two thirds felt coerced to give money by aggressive panhandling.The folks in your book talk a lot about the 80/20 rule applying all over the place. That something like 20% of the people you catch are committing 80% of the crimes.There's a similar dynamic that you talk about on the subways, both in the book and in your commentary over the past couple years about disorder in New York. You say approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness are at risk for street homelessness, and these people cycle through the cities, streets, subways, jails, and hospitals.What lessons from the ‘90s can be applied today for both helping those people and stopping them being a threat to others?Before the ‘80s and Reagan budget cuts there had been a psychiatric system that could help people. That largely got defunded. [Deinstitutionalization began in New York State earlier, in the 1960s.] We did not solve the problem of mental health or homelessness in the ‘90s, but we solved the problem of behavior. George Kelling [of broken windows theory] emphasized this repeatedly, and people would ignore it. We are not criminalizing homelessness or poverty. We're focusing on behavior that we are trying to change. People who willfully ignore that distinction almost assume that poor people are naturally disorderly or criminal, or that all homeless people are twitching and threatening other people. Even people with mental illness can behave in a public space.Times have changed a bit. I think there are different drugs now that make things arguably a bit worse. I am not a mental health expert, but we do need more involuntary commitment, not just for our sake, but for theirs, people who need help. I pass people daily, often the same person, basically decomposing on a subway stop in the cold. They are offered help by social services, and they say no. They should not be allowed to make that choice because they're literally dying on the street in front of us. Basic humanity demands that we be a little more aggressive in forcing people who are not making rational decisions, because now you have to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. That standard does need to change. But there also need to be mental health beds available for people in this condition.I don't know what the solution is to homelessness or mental health. But I do know the solution to public disorder on the subway and that's, regardless of your mental state or housing status, enforcing legal, constitutional rules, policing behavior. It does not involve locking everybody up. It involves drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It's amazing how much people will comply with those rules.That presents the idea that someone's in charge, it's not a free-for-all. You get that virtuous loop, which New York had achieved in 2014–2016, when crime was at an all-time low in the city. Then the politicians decided public order wasn't worth preserving anymore. These are political choices.I had a similar version of this conversation with a friend who was shocked that there were zero murders on the subway in 2017 and that that number was stable: you had one or two a year for several years in the mid-2010s.It was five or fewer a year from 1997 to 2019, and often one or two. Then you have zero in 2017. There were [ten in 2022]. It coincides perfectly with an order from [Mayor] de Blasio's office and the homeless czar [Director of Homeless Services Steven] Banks [which] told police to stop enforcing subway rules against loitering. The subways became — once again — a de facto homeless shelter. Getting rule-violating homeless people out of the subway in the late ‘80s was such a difficult and major accomplishment at the time, and to be fair it's not as bad as it was.The alternative was that homeless outreach was supposed to offer people services. When they decline, which 95% of people do, you're to leave them be. I would argue again, I don't think that's a more humane stance to take. But it's not just about them, it's about subway riders.There's one story that I think was relevant for you to tell. You were attacked this fall on a subway platform by a guy threatening to kill you. It turns out he's had a number of run-ins with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us where that guy is now?I believe he's in prison now. The only reason I know who it is is because I said, one day I'm going to see his picture in the New York Post because he's going to hurt somebody. Am I 100 percent certain it's Michael Blount who attacked me? No, but I'm willing to call him out by name because I believe it is. He was out of prison for raping a child, and he slashed his ex-girlfriend and pushed her on the subway tracks. And then was on the lam for a while. I look at him and the shape of his face, his height, age, build, complexion, and I go, that's got to be him.I wasn't hurt, but he gave me a sucker punch trying to knock me out and then chased me a bit threatening to kill me, and I believe he wanted to. It's the only time I ever was confronted by a person who I really believe wanted to kill me, and this includes policing in the Eastern District in Baltimore. It was an attempted misdemeanor assault in the long run. But I knew it wasn't about me. It was him. I assume he's going to stay in prison longer for what he did to his ex-girlfriend. But I never thought it would happen to me. I was lucky the punch didn't connect.Peter Moskos's new book is Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.My reading listEssays:Johnny Hirschauer's reporting, including “A Failed 'Solution' to 'America's Mental Health Crisis',“ “Return to the Roots,” and “The Last Institutions.” “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. ​“It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem,” Charles Lehman.Books:Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy.​Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Fred Siegel.​ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos.​Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones.​Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

What happens when design trends come full circle? In this illuminating conversation with kitchen designer and educator Jan Rutgers, we explore the fascinating evolutions and throwbacks dominating KBIS 2025. Having toured the show for three consecutive years, Jan shares how today's cutting-edge designs are actually sophisticated reimaginings of elements from decades past.The reign of hard, angular kitchen elements is giving way to what Jan calls "soft geometry" – curved islands, arched cooking hearths, and rounded fixtures that not only look beautiful but solve practical problems like the dreaded "hip bangers" of rectangular corners. These softer forms create more comfortable, functional spaces while adding visual interest.Color has returned with surprising warmth, featuring muted 70s-inspired palettes of terracottas, greens, and yellows appearing on everything from cabinet doors to appliances. Meanwhile, fluting (also called pole wrap) continues its dominance but is evolving toward wider slat applications that create more architectural presence.Perhaps most exciting is the movement beyond basic shaker doors, with manufacturers finally introducing leather, metal, and textured center panels. Freestanding vanities lead this charge with curved drawers, multiple finishes, and exceptional interior functionality – proving that beautiful design doesn't require sacrificing practicality.For designers navigating industry uncertainties, Jan offers valuable perspective on the "changing of the guard" as veterans retire and new professionals enter the field. This transition, coupled with the enduring consumer desire for beautiful, functional spaces, creates opportunities for differentiation through thoughtful marketing and diversified product offerings.Whether you're a design professional looking to stay ahead of trends or a homeowner planning your next renovation, this episode provides crucial insights into where kitchen and bath design is heading – with one foot firmly planted in the wisdom of the past.If you would like to get the links and show notes for this episode, click on the link below:​https://www.designerdiscussions.com/episodes/episode-137-KBIS-2025-Trends-from-the-Show-FloorTransform your marketing with Designer Discussions Academy. In weekly face-to-face sessions, we equip busy business owners with cutting-edge PR strategies, marketing insights, and time-saving tools to not just work in your business, but on your business. Join us to outshine competitors and elevate your business.Join us for our weekly live sessions and workshops: https://www.designerdiscussionsmarketing.studio/pages/academyDesigner Discussions is an educational interior design podcast on marketing, PR and related business topics. We also provide in-depth, actionable products in the Marketing Studio including time-saving templates and guides to help design professionals grow their businesses. Download our FREE Client Avatar Guide https://designerdiscussionsmarketing.studio/store. Designer Discussions is a partnership of three experts: Jason Lockhart, CEO of KABMS; Maria Martin, founder of DesignAppy; and Mirjam Lippuner, founder of Get Ink DIY

March 21, 2025 ~ Katherine Alexis Thomas plays Kathy and Debbie Williams, show choreographer for "Vanities: The Musical" talk to Paul W Smith about the play running now through April 13th at Meadow Brook Theatre.

Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

Join us as we walk through the Wisdom of Solomon in his sermonic book of "Ecclesiates." Solomon in his repentant and restored state turns from King to preacher as he warns others about the folly which He has found to be "The Vanity of Vanities." This week we look at Chapter 1 "The Vanity of Life"

Today David talks to author Nicholas van Hoogstraten about his brand-new book Broadway Poster Art: 1945-1969 which chronicles the evolution of Broadway posters including many by Al Hirschfeld. David and Nicholas discuss the making of the book, how certain posters got selected, and the stories of some of the many Al Hirschfeld posters featured in the book. Order the book now at BroadwayPosters.com Thank you to the Algonquin Hotel for hosting us for this episode. Happy Holidays to everyone and we'll see you in the new year with brand-new episodes of the Hirschfeld Century Podcast! Follow along with the show notes to view the works mentioned in this episode: Ray Bolger in Three to Make Ready, 1946 Ray Bolger in Where's Charley?, 1949 Ray Bolger Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Poster), 1949 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York Times Drawing), 1949 Bell, Book and Candle, 1950 Bonanza Bound, 1947 Man and Superman, 1947 My Fair Lady (Original Poster), 1956 My Fair Lady (Poster with Generic Figures), 1970 Reclining Figure (Both Versions), 1954 Man of La Mancha (Drawing for Poster), 1965 Man of La Mancha (New York Times Drawing), 1965 Hair, 1968 Earl Carroll's Vanities, 1931 Visit our website Visit our shop Like us on Facebook Subscribe to our Youtube Channel   Watch Hirschfeld Moments: Ep.4 - Hirschfeld Draws a Star! Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram HirschfeldHomestyle.com The Hirschfeld Package at The Algonquin Hotel

Milton Justice is an Academy and Emmy Award winning producer, On Broadway he produced Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carre,. Off Broadway he produced Jack Heifner's, Vanities (which became the longest running play in Off-Broadway history. His book, I Don't Need An Acting Class, was published in November of 2021 and his podcast, also called  I Don't Need An Acting Class, was recently listed at the 9th most popular entertainment podcast in history.

Jennifer spills the beans on what it takes to be an actress in Hollywood. We talk "Beverly Hills Housewives", how your gal pal will cover your problem spots in lesbian love scenes, poker, glamour, getting hit on by producers, and the indignity of promoting yourself by going on to podcasts like this one.Bio: Jennifer Tilly received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Woody Allen's “Bullets Over Broadway” for her memorable portrayal of the terribly untalented Olive, actress wannabe, and gangster's moll. Her performance in “Liar Liar” as Jim Carrey's gold-digging client earned her an American Comedy Award nomination, as well as a Blockbuster award nomination as Favorite Supporting Actress.Tilly is perhaps best known from the indie noir film “Bound”, which has earned her a cult following. “Bound,” directed by the Wachowski's follows two lesbian con artists trying to rip off the mob. The film garnered many accolades including a GLAAD media award, and a Saturn award nomination (Best Actress) for Tilly. Other film credits include “The Getaway,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “Let It Ride,” “The Cat's Meow,” “Intervention,”(Winner-Best Actress-San Diego Film Festival) “Dancing at the Blue Iguana,” “Made in America,” “Bride of Chucky,” (Saturn Award nominee-Best Actress) “Seed of Chucky,” “Curse of Chucky,” “Cult of Chucky,” “The Crew,” “The Wrong Guy,” “Inconceivable,” (Winner-Best Actress-WIFT) “An American Girl,” “Edie and Penn,” “Hide and Seek,” “Saint Ralph,” “The Doors,” ”Relative Evil” (Winner-Best Actress-DVD Exclusive Awards) “Second Best,” “Tidelands,” and many more. Other notable TV appearances include “Modern Family,” “Drop Dead Diva,” “Moonlighting,” “Cheers,” and “Frasier.” She had recurring roles on “Hill Street Blues,” “It's Garry Shandling's show (Ace award nomination-Best Actress) and “Out of Practice” (CBS). She was a series regular on “Key West” (Fox) and “Shaping Up.” (NBC) Tilly is in great demand as a voice over actor. For the last twenty-two years she has delighted audiences as Bonnie on “Family Guy.” She played the snaky haired Celia in Pixar's classic movie “Monster's Inc.,” as well as the Disney+ series “Monsters at Work,” Grace, the new age cow in Disney's “Home on the Range,” a con mouse in “Stuart Little,” and Madame Leota in “The Haunted Mansion.”Theatre credits include "Tartuffe," (LA Public Theatre) "Boy's Life" (LAAT) and "Baby With The Bathwater," (LAPT) and “Vanities,” (Dramalogue Award-Best Actress) She received a “TheatreWorld Award” (Best Newcomer) for her performance in Second Stage's "One Shoe Off" at the Joseph Papp Theatre.  Tilly is also a regular performer in the smash hit comedy revue, “Celebrity Autobiography” and Illeana Douglas' “Living Room Show.” These days Jennifer is dividing her career between acting and poker. In 2005 she astounded the Poker world when she bested a field of over 600 women to win the coveted gold bracelet at The World Series of Poker. She followed that up by capturing a WPT title, winning Ladies Night 3.

“But, have you played lesbian multiple times!?” We're journalists, kids. And we're here with the one and only Beth Broderick. You Might Know Her From Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Lost, Psycho Beach Party, The 5 Mrs Buchanans, Bad Actress, Sharp Objects, Love & Death, Hearts Afire, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Beth gave us all the goods on playing witch-cum-scientist-cum-CANDLE (!) Zelda Spellman on Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the specialness of reprising that role in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina 18 years later. We also got to discuss her working relationships with everyone from Marc Cherry to Brad Pitt to her Psycho Beach Party co-star Charles Busch; the wild ride that was the notorious The Bonfire of The Vanities (how tall is Bruce Willis, really?), and how her AIDS activism has connected her to the LGBT community. We had a beautiful conversation with Beth and just in time for Halloweenie! Happy Spooky Season to all you ghouls. Patreon: www.patreon.com/youmightknowherfrom Follow us on social media: @youmightknowherfrom || @damianbellino || @rodemanne Discussed this episode: Lazy Eye TikTok  Actor height TikTok  Kristen Bell, Forest Whitaker, Andy Cohen, Billy Eichner, Emily from The Chicks  Damian recommends the Annie Murphy show, Kevin Can F*** Himself Hearts Afire The Five Mrs. Buchanans Series with Brad Pitt, Glory Days Marc Cherry was, you guessed it, mean Beth Broderick's Substack Was in a relationship with Brian DePalma while making Bonfire of the Vanity The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood by Julie Salamon  Slammer Girls Chuck Vincent was a director who made Hard-R and XXX films and loved Beth Caged Bordello House of the Rising Sun (billed as Norris O'Neal)  Charles Busch and Bob King created  Psycho Beach Party Stealing Home with Jonathan Silverman Casting director, Bonnie Timmerman Play German prostitute in Thousand Pieces of Gold and British accent in Bonfire of the Vanities Delta Burke movie, Maternal Instincts Tom Cruise standing on an apple crate?  Mike from Real World: Miami and his tall girlfriend, Nic Danny DeVito is 4'10” Reba McEntyre has new show with Melissa Peterman (her old co-star from Reba) Cissy Houston's note in “Ain't No Way” Cissy singing background for Aretha's “Rollin in the Deep” (esp 1:20 mark)

Es bizli The Cure, es bizli 90ies-Alt-Rock-Glanz, es bizli Post-Punk-Revival: Fertig ist eine der eingängigsten Indie-Platten des Jahres. Drei Jahre nach «Vanities» überzeugt das dritte Album dieser fünf Musiker:innen aus Manchester – auch dank dem Feinschliff von Super-Producer Ross Orton. «Every Inch of Earth Pulsates» ist unser neustes Album der Woche. Vinyl und CDs daily, ausschliesslich Live on the air!

Crime data has been a flashpoint in this election. Kamala Harris has claimed that violent crime is at a “near 50-year low,” while Donald Trump has insisted that crime is going up. According to the numbers reported to the F.B.I., Harris is right: Crime, especially violent crime, has been falling. But if you look at survey data, Trump is tapping into something people feel. Last year, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that they believe crime is on the rise.So what's going on here? Why, if crime is falling, do people feel less safe? Charles Fain Lehman, a crime and drug policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute, wrote a piece on his Substack, The Causal Fallacy, on exactly this question. In this conversation, we discuss why he thinks Americans are feeling less safe, despite what the data says, as well as the ideological shifts taking place around drugs and crime, on both the left and the right.Mentioned:“Breakdown” by Heather Mac Donald“Between Tolerant Containment and Concerted Constraint: Managing Madness for the City and the Privileged Family” by Neil GongBook Recommendations:Thinking About Crime by James Q. WilsonAgainst Excess by Mark KleimanThe Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom WolfeThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

There are vanities and there are verities. There are fancies and there are facts. There are passing things and there are enduring things. There are bursting bubbles and there are lasting beauties. Giving full rein to the force of the apostle's language, Spurgeon assesses what it means not to look at, to mark, to heed, to consider, the things which can only be seen, which are passing away, whether present joys or sorrows. His language digs in quite fiercely, pressing us to ask how much significance we attach to that which is passing away. Then he turns to the things which cannot now be seen, but which are spiritually substantial, the eternal glories which “gleam afar to nerve our faint endeavour.” Spurgeon says these need to be grasped by faith as we meditate upon them. They must be considered with delight by God's people, to stir our affections and appetites (though considered with horror by the unconverted, so that they might be turned to Christ before all their delights are ruined forever). They must be dwelt upon with hope, so that we live truly as heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, inheritors together with the saints in light. The striking contrast of the text comes out in the emphatic way in which Spurgeon holds before us the emptiness of a passing world, and the fulness of joy in the world which is to come. Read the sermon: https://www.mediagratiae.org/resources/vanities-and-verities Check out the new From the Heart of Spurgeon Book! British: https://amzn.to/48rV1OR American: https://amzn.to/48oHjft Connect with the Reading Spurgeon Community on Twitter! https://twitter.com/ReadingSpurgeon Sign up to get the weekly readings emailed to you: https://www.mediagratiae.org/podcasts-1/from-the-heart-of-spurgeon. Check out other Media Gratiae podcasts at www.mediagratiae.org Download the Media Gratiae App: https://subsplash.com/mediagratiae/app

A new MP3 sermon from Maidenbower Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Vanities and Verities (sermon 1380) Subtitle: From the heart of Spurgeon Speaker: C. H. Spurgeon Broadcaster: Maidenbower Baptist Church Event: Podcast Date: 10/11/2024 Bible: 2 Corinthians 4:18 Length: 28 min.

There are vanities and there are verities. There are fancies and there are facts. There are passing things and there are enduring things. There are bursting bubbles and there are lasting beauties. Giving full rein to the force of the apostle's language, Spurgeon assesses what it means not to look at, to mark, to heed, to consider, the things which can only be seen, which are passing away, whether present joys or sorrows. His language digs in quite fiercely, pressing us to ask how much significance we attach to that which is passing away. Then he turns to the things which cannot now be seen, but which are spiritually substantial, the eternal glories which "gleam afar to nerve our faint endeavour." Spurgeon says these need to be grasped by faith as we meditate upon them. They must be considered with delight by God's people, to stir our affections and appetites (though considered with horror by the unconverted, so that they might be turned to Christ before all their delights are ruined forever). They must be dwelt upon with hope, so that we live truly as heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, inheritors together with the saints in light. The striking contrast of the text comes out in the emphatic way in which Spurgeon holds before us the emptiness of a passing world, and the fulness of joy in the world which is to come.

A new MP3 sermon from Maidenbower Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Vanities and Verities (sermon 1380) Subtitle: From the heart of Spurgeon Speaker: C. H. Spurgeon Broadcaster: Maidenbower Baptist Church Event: Podcast Date: 10/11/2024 Bible: 2 Corinthians 4:18 Length: 28 min.

We're here! We promise! It's just been a bit of a rough one! Join us for double-feature of problematic(?) Tom Hanks with Big (1988) and Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Want to receive all the Helen Hall Library news that's fit to print? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sign up for our newsletter!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you haven't already, please follow and rate the podcast and check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Emory's blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for movie screening updates, more reviews, and sign up for personalized recommendations by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠joining the AV Club⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

In this episode, Jennifer Barrett explores two interpretations of Eccl. 1:2, where the Preacher declares that "vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Vanities no longer sit in front of a plain drywalled wall. Home buyers of today want a more exciting look. Enter the vanity wall. Vanity walls have much more depth, textures, and offer a unique backdrop to your bathroom. We share all the different techniques used to make your bathroom vanities in your new construction home really pop with style. Thanks for listening! Have a comment, potential guest, idea for topic, or want to sponsor our show?   Email:  homebuildinghero@yahoo.com Twitter:  @building_hero Facebook:  www.facebook.com/homebuildinghero Instagram:  @homebuildinghero Insider Club:  https://mailchi.mp/062ece3a2b79/home-building-hero-podcast-email-list   Thanks to our studio sponsor LP Building Solutions!   To learn more about my homes visit Belman Homes and When you have a moment, pick up a copy of my new Amazon Best Selling book "Leadership Growth Hacks" at https://amzn.to/2ZBRuN3

Whether we accomplish much or very little, why does it even matter if we know we will one day die? Ecclesiastes begins with what seems to be despair. Even if we achieve all this world has to offer, it remains meaningless apart from Christ.  

Even the best things in life leave us unfulfilled and unsatisfied. So, what hope do we have?Join us each week for the Chasing Shadows podcast—new episodes available on Thursdays throughout the Ecclesiastes series.Do you have a question you'd like us to answer? Email us at podcast@austinstone.org.Watch on YouTube

Ross Lester examines the vanity of life under the sun to point us to the fullness of life in Jesus beyond the sun.

Mr. Monopoly picked a Brian De Palma film for rock musical month... not to be confused with the first time he was on the podcast, and picked the Brian De Palma film 734: Bonfire of the Vanities. Next up in rock musical month is Streets of Fire (1984).

Living in society - especially as young adults - we should be concerned about our appearances. But when does it become the sin of vanity? Should we seek to be beautiful or handsome, and when does it become a distraction? Where does real beauty come from? Tune in to hear the Restless crew discuss how good looking we are...uh, I mean, how to avoid the sin of vanity!

Leah Buley and Joe Natoli have teamed up to make something great (check out the reviews on Amazon!) even greater. How? Well, considering that The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide was written more than a decade ago, it was time to revisit the content and make it even more relevant for today's UX teams. After all, times have changed. But the fundamental principles of the original book haven't changed. They are as solid today as they were 11 years ago. What has changed is that the methods have been adapted for the speed of change in today's businesses. Joe says it best: “These methods are shorter. They're simpler. They're more direct in a lot of ways, and they cut to the chase in a way that longer processes don't. I've met plenty of senior people who are throwing up their hands and going, ‘We're doing all the things. Why isn't this working?' And the truth is, they're kind of overworking and overthinking. Everything in this book is practical and direct and gets you from point A to B. I just don't think there's any better way to get there.” What You'll Learn from this Episode: - About Leah's experience as a solo UX practitioner and the inspiration behind the first edition of UX Team of One - How the UX field has changed over the past decade - How the second edition aims to provide comprehensive yet practical UX methods that can be applied in various organizational settings - About the shortcomings of UX boot camps and educational programs - A perspective that balances UX advocacy with business objectives and the reality of corporate politics - How to navigate and thrive in a UX career despite industry challenges, focusing on practical, adaptable methods and tools. Quick Reference Guide: 0:46 - Introduction of Leah and Joe 1:33 - The User Experience Team of One, second edition 6:46 - Large or small team, Leah and Joe's book is comprehensive without being overwhelming 8:58 - Righting wrongs 12:14 - What's new in the second edition – striving to do more with less 15:58 - Break - plug for the Rosenverse 18:20 - The current shitstorm 21:39 - On speed 24:40 - On toolkits. Tools and methods are two different things. 28:16 - Who needs The User Experience Team of One? 30:45 - Leah and Joe's gifts for the audience Resources and Links from Today's Episode: Rick Rubin's The Creative Act https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886 Jakob Bro, jazz guitarist https://jakobbro.com/web/ Confessions of a Pricing Man by Hermann Simon https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Everything/dp/3319203991 Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe https://www.amazon.com/Bonfire-Vanities-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427573 The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide by Leah Buley and Joe Natoli https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/the-user-experience-team-of-one-second-edition/

We took the holiday week off,  so we're sharing an episode from behind the paywall. Coming soon: new episodes on The Biden Problem, SCOTUS, and Israeli illiberalism as an inspiration for the global right. ***In this episode, from January 2024, writer Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?Further Reading:Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," New York Magazine, June 1972— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)— A Man in Full (1998)— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our extensive catalogue of bonus episodes!

Wrong way: read books about making good movies.Right way: read books about making a bad movie, and then don't do that.This book tells the story of a historic box office flop, Bonfire of the Vanities. (It is historic in the sense that someone wrote a book about it.) Hear us make fun of the people who made it! Even though they seem very talented!*JOIN OUR PATREON for bonus episodes and exclusive clips of Kellen's stand up!https://www.patreon.com/TheBookPile*If you want to read/listen to The Devil's Candy and support the podcast in a fun way, click here to buy the book! Free on Audible to first-time subscribers! Free on Kindle to Amazon Prime members!https://amzn.to/45LA6GK*Dave's book / game The Starlings is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMBBLGXN?ref=myi_title_dp*Kellen Erskine has appeared on Conan, Comedy Central, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC's America's Got Talent, and the Amazon Original Series Inside Jokes. He has garnered over 100 million views with his clips on Dry Bar Comedy. In 2018 he was selected to perform on the “New Faces” showcase at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. He currently tours the country www.KellenErskine.com*David Vance's videos have garnered over 1 billion views. He has written viral ads for companies like Squatty Potty, Chatbooks, and Lumē, and sketches for the comedy show Studio C. His work has received two Webby Awards, and appeared on Conan. He currently works as a writer on the sitcom Freelancers.

NOTE: This episode includes themes of child sexual abuse, violence, and suicide. The following material may be distressing to some listeners.  Bonfire of the Vanities novelist Tom Wolfe would have described our guest for this episode as a ‘King of the World'. A banker who through skill and a love of risk made his fortune as a city trader.  Now the CEO of the World Gold Council, David Tait is also an accomplished mountaineer having climbed Everest an astonishing five times, in the process raising over £8m for charity.  But Wolfe's description would, in fact, not come close to explaining the truth of who David really is.The clue lies in the beneficiary of David's incredible fund raising, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. For David, at the age of 10, was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his grandfather's brother and three other men. He was also abused by his own father.Like so many who suffer this horror David kept his abuse secret.  Doing so, he believes, allowed him to build that successful city life … but at a terrible price that very nearly claimed his life.  David's story was portrayed movingly in the 2020 film Sulphur and White named after the butterfly that become a symbol of hope for David. In this podcast we talk about that film and a personal crisis journey that can only be described as inspiring.  Please remember - if you, or anyone you know needs support for child abuse, you can reach out to NSPCC here: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-is-child-abuse/types-of-abuse/child-sexual-abuse/ and here 0808 800 5000.  LINKSSulphur and White Watch Sulphur and White | Prime Video (amazon.co.uk)      Sulphur and White - Apple TV (UK)Sulphur and White | Official Movie Website | Watch Now  David's websiteDavid Tait  NSPCC Donate to Charity Online | Give to NSPCC today | NSPCC  Stream/buy ‘Allies' by Some Velvet Morning: https://ampl.ink/qp6bm    Some Velvet Morning Website: www.somevelvetmorning.co.uk      Your Daily Practice: Sleep by Myndstream: https://open.spotify.com/track/5OX9XgJufFz9g63o2Dv2i5?si=b2f9397c92084682    Host – Andy Coulson   CWC team: Jane Sankey, Louise Difford, Mabel Pickering   With special thanks to Ioana Barbu and the brilliant people at Global      For all PR and guest approaches please contact – podcast@coulsonpartners.comFull transcipthttps://www.crisiswhatcrisis.com/podcasts/david-tait-on-how-he-turned-the-darkest-of-secret-crises-into-a-superpower/

The Drunk Guys become masters of the beer universe this week when they read Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. They master: Compartmentalized by Finback, Murderous by Pipeworks, Cake News by Omipollo, Gimme the Gorbage by Little House, and Oop! I Hopped My Pants! by Sand City Brewing. Join

Here's the Movie Tourist Article Scarlet Witch found, discussing Philadelphia locations in chronological order. We reference episode 734 - The Bonfire of the Vanities, which had the same director. The next Philly Philm will be Trading Places (1983).

Join your host Duncan Under The Stairs discussing all things Horror on The Podcast Under the Stairs. The Podcast Under the Stairs returns with another Director's Roundtable. Duncan is joined by Bo Ransdell & Doug Tilley to roundtable to discuss, over two epic episodes, the filmography of Brian De Palma. This is part two and will cover his active years of 1981-2019. Films Discussed are: CHAPTER 1 Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), Body Double (1984), Wise Guys (1986), The Untouchables (1987) & Casualties of War (1989). CHAPTER 2 The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), Raising Cain (1992), Carlito's Way (1993) & Mission Impossible (1995) & Snake Eyes (1998) CHAPTER 3 Mission to Mars (2000), Femme Fatale (2002), The Black Dahlia (2005), Redacted (2007), Passion (2012) & Domino (2019). Duncan's Top 5 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. Blow Out 2. The Untouchables 3. Body Double 4. Carlito's Way 5. Snake Eyes Bo's Top 5 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. The Untouchables 2. Blow Out 3. Carlito's Way 4. Mission Impossible 5. Raising Cain Doug's Top 5 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. Blow Out 2. Mission Impossible 3. Carlito's Way 4. The Untouchables 5. Snake Eyes Duncan's Bottom 3 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. The Bonfire of the Vanities 2. Redacted 3. Domino Bo's Bottom 3 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. Redacted 2. Mission to Mars 3. The Bonfire of the Vanities Doug's Bottom 3 De Palma - 1981-2019 1. Redacted 2. The Bonfire of the Vanities 3. Domino Duncan's Top 5 De Palma 1. Blow Out 2. The Untouchables 3. Dressed to Kill 4. Carrie 5. Body Double Bo's Top 5 De Palma 1. The Untouchables 2. Blow Out 3. Carrie 4. Carlito's Way 5. Phantom of the Paradise Doug's Top 5 De Palma 1. Phantom of the Paradise 2. Carrie 3. Blow Out 4. The Dressed to Kill 5. Mission Impossible Duncan's Bottom 3 De Palma 1. Home Movies 2. Murder ala Mod 3. Bonfire of the Vanities Bo's Bottom 3 De Palma 1. Redacted 2. The Fury 3. Get to Know Your Rabbit! Doug's Bottom 3 De Palma 1. Home Movies 2. Redacted 3. The Bonfire of the Vanities Our RSS Feed: ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/13ba6ef0/podcast/rss⁠ Check out the show on ⁠Anchor⁠, ⁠iTunes⁠, ⁠TuneIn⁠ & on ⁠Stitcher Radio⁠. Please leave us feedback on ⁠iTunes⁠, podcastunderthestairs@gmail.com and follow us on ⁠Facebook⁠ & ⁠Twitter⁠. TIME CODES FOR VIDEO 00:00 Intro 00:11:00 Blow Out (1981) Review 00:25:40 Scarface (1983) Review 00:47:20 Body Double (1984) Review 01:05:45 Dancing in the Dark (Music Video) Review 01:13:30 Wise Guys (1986) Review 01:27:00 The Untouchables (1987) Review 01:47:30 Casualties of War (1989) Review 02:12:50 INTERMISSION 02:14:30 The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) Review 02:33:10 Raising Cain (1992) Review 02:49:50 Carlito's Way (1993) Review 03:02:40 Mission Impossible (1995) Review 03:19:50 Snake Eyes (1998) Review 03:35:55 INTERMISSION 03:37:20 Mission to Mars (2000) Review 03:58:50 Femme Fatale (2002) Review 04:17:20 The Black Dahlia (2005) Review 04:34:30 Redacted (2007) Review 04:46:00 Passion (2012) Review 04:58:00 Domino (2019) Review 05:16:40 Our Top 5 Movies & Bottom 3 Movies Full Catalog 05:23:45 Our Top 5 Movies & Bottom 3 Movies Full Catalog 05:29:15 Final Thoughts & Goodbyes

Today's episode is the second part of my recent conversation with author BEN WEST, regarding his his exceptionally comprehensive new book: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL — EVOLUTION OF AN ART FORM. This book traces the American Musical's creative journey from its 19th Century beginnings through its 20th Century maturation, and on to the turn of the 21st century. Along the way, Ben West sheds new light on a myriad of shows, authors, directors, and performers including a host of often-overlooked women and African-American artists. If you missed the first episode in this series you may want to go back and catch on that before listening to this one. As our previous episode ended Ben and I were discussing the revue form, especially the annual revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies and Earl Carroll's Vanities. Today we pick up conversation with some of the other forms of musical theater that Ben explores in Part Two of his book, a section that he titles Birth Of An Art Form. Ben West is a musical theatre artist and historian who created the extensive “Timeline Wall” exhibits for the Museum of Broadway that trace the history of the Broadway stage from 1732 to 2021 and spotlight more than 500 productions and 100 artists. He has worked in various capacities on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally, and created and directed Unsung Carolyn Leigh for Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. West has lectured and spoken at several institutions including Yale University, University of Michigan, the Dramatists Guild, and the Shubert Organization. He is a recipient of Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award. Become a PATRON of Broadway Nation! This podcast is made possible in part by the generous support of our Patron Club Members, including our newest member, Taryn Darr. For just $7.00 a month, you will receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the discussions that I have with my guests — in fact I often record nearly twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited versions. You will also have access to additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host Albert Evans that have not been featured on the podcast. All patrons receive special “on-air” shout-outs and acknowledgment of your vital support of this podcast. And if you are very enthusiastic about Broadway Nation there are additional PATRON levels that come with even more benefits. If you would like to support the work of Broadway Nation and receive these exclusive member benefits, please just click on this link: https://broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech/ Thank you in advance for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe Biden, Decency, and the President's 2024 White House Correspondent's Dinner. A clip from 1990's The Bonfire of the Vanities. We're joined by John Dombroski, founder and president of Grand Canyon Planning. Listener call-in's on decency. Station General Manager Mark Durkin joins the show to propose an office-wide party. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In March of 1932 Jack Benny was headlining on Broadway as part of Earl Carroll's Vanities when friend Ed Sullivan invited him to appear on Ed's radio show. At the time Benny had no great interest in radio, but he went on Sullivan's quarter-hour show March 19th, 1932, as a favor. His first line was “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say, ‘Who cares?” Canada Dry Ginger Ale's advertising agency heard Benny and offered him a show. Benny debuted on NBC's Blue Network on May 2nd, 1932. This initial series aired Mondays and Wednesdays. Benny's wife of five years, Sadye Marks, who'd performed with him on Vaudeville, joined the cast on August 3rd as Mary Livingstone. In storyline she was a young Benny fan from Plainfield, New Jersey. Eventually she read humorous poetry and letters from her mother, and much later she would become a main deflator of Benny's ego. On October 30th, 1932 the show moved to CBS. During this time Benny began ribbing his sponsor in a gentle, good-natured way. Canada Dry got upset, and despite a rating in radio's top twenty, they canceled the show after January 26th, 1933. Chevrolet, which had recently lost Al Jolson, was waiting in the wings. On Friday, March 17th, 1933 at 10PM from New York, Benny debuted with The Chevrolet Program over NBC's Red Network. The June 23rd, 1933 episode was the last of the season as well as Mary Livingstone's twenty-eighth birthday. Howard Claney was announcer with Frank Black as orchestra leader and James Melton as the tenor. When the show returned in the fall it was on Sundays at 10PM from New York. Benny's program slowly began to morph from variety into more developed comedic skits. He also started to show the character traits that would come to define his persona. Unfortunately, Chevrolet didn't like the series and fired him after the April 1st, 1934 episode. But, the General Tire Company immediately scooped him up. Benny debuted on their program the following Friday, April 6th, 1934 at 10PM. There, he first worked with announcer Don Wilson. Wilson would remain with Benny until 1965. Often the butt of weight-based jokes, Wilson's deep belly laugh that could often be heard above the studio audience and his deep, rich voice became a show trademark. This is audio from that April 6th, 1934 episode. That summer Mary and Jack adopted their daughter Joan. She was two weeks old. Jack later said in his autobiography that as Joan grew older, she came to look like he and Mary. She had Mary's face with Jack's blue eyes and his love for music. Benny, Don Wilson, and Mary Livingstone worked together, along with tenor Frank Parker and orchestra leader Don Bestor on The General Tire Show until September 28th, 1934. Then, General Foods came calling. They wanted Benny's help saving a gelatin product of theirs called Jell-O, which was getting badly beaten by Knox Gelatin in sales. On October 14th, 1934 Benny moved to Sunday nights at 7PM from NBC's Blue Network. His rating immediately leapt into the top five. On April 7th, 1935 the show was regularly broadcast from New York for the final time. The Jell-O Program would be moving to Hollywood. Benny simultaneously made Broadway Melody of 1936 and It's In The Air on film. Until the mid-1930s, New York and Chicago were the main broadcasting hubs. Frank Nelson remembered early Hollywood radio. Nelson began working with Benny in June of 1934. Even in 1935, it was still more costly for shows to originate from Southern California. Here's actress Mary Jane Higby, who grew up in Los Angeles, but moved to New York in 1937, explaining why. On November 3rd, 1935 Kenny Baker joined the show as the new singer. That year, Benny's show climbed to second overall in the ratings. The following year Benny made The Big Broadcast of 1937 on film, and on October 4th, 1936 Phil Harris debuted as the new band leader. With Phil Harris in place, Benny's most-famous cast was taking shape.

How time flies when the world is on fire… a quarter of 2024 has already passed and the Matts check global progress against their expectations at New Year. It's a grind reality check as Gaza and Ukraine go from bad to worse and Trump appears to be gaining ground on the White House. On the upside, there've been a bunch of cultural highlights to provide welcome distraction - not least the publication this week of Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan. “It's like Bonfire Of the Vanities… but better” says Matt d'Ancona. Enjoy!Subscribe to the New European and get a free signed copy of James O'Brien's hardback book, How They Broke Britain (worth £20!) when you use this link >>https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/2matts/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Episode 163, Sara Hildreth, from @FictionMatters and co-host of the podcast Novel Pairings, returns for her third appearance on our show as our expert for Classics & Retellings 101. Sara guides us through the sometimes intimidating world of timeless reads in an accessible way. She busted some myths about classics and changed my mind about some elements of the classics. And, she has a great approach to find the perfect retelling of your favorite classics for your next read.  This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Highlights Sara explores the definitions of a classic and a modern classic book. We talk about separating the American literature canon from the idea of a classic. Sara talks about being free to define classics on personal terms. The idea of a book being labeled a “future classic.” Now-famous books that went unnoticed initially when they were released. Sara's personal reading motivations. Common issues people have when trying to tackle classic books. Notable quirks of many classics that were first published as serials. Tips and advice for approaching older books. Addressing the pressure surrounding reading or revisiting classics. Examples of nonfiction classics. Legal considerations for all those retellings. The rise of retellings as a trend with today's audience. The difference between retellings and fan fiction. Sara's recommendations for accessible classic literature. A different approach to finding the right retelling for your reading. Please note: Sara mistakenly mentions during the discussion that The Great Gatsbydid not come into popularity until its distribution to soldiers during World War I, when this actually occurred during World War II. Sara's Book Recommendations [49:02] Two OLD Books She Loves — Classics The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton | Amazon | Bookshop.org [49:43] Passing by Nella Larson | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [53:12] Other Books Mentioned The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton [50:58] The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton [50:59] Roman Fever and Other Stories by Edith Wharton [51:03] The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett [55:44] Two NEW Books She Loves — Retellings Anna K by Jenny Lee | Amazon | Bookshop.org [57:35] The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vho | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:00:28] Other Books Mentioned Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy [59:01] Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar [59:53] Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan [59:58] One Book She DIDN'T Love — Classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain | Amazon | Bookshop.org[1:03:25] One NEW RELEASE She's Excited About — Retelling and Classic Pairing The Garden by Claire Beams (April 9, 2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:05:12] Other Books Mentioned The Illness Lesson by Claire Beams [1:05:37] Little Women by Louisa May Alcott [1:05:41] The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett [1:06:21] Last 5-Star Book Sara Read James by Percival Everett (March 19, 2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:07:47] Books Mentioned During the Classics Discussion The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe [3:44] Beloved by Toni Morrison [10:46] Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver [12:05] David Copperfield by Charles Dickens [12:19] James by Percival Everett (March 19, 2024) [13:29] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain [13:34] Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys [13:51] Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë [14:02] The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald [14:45] Frankenstein by Mary Shelley [15:09] Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn [15:20] Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë [24:27] A Model of Christian Charity: A City on a Hill by John Winthrop [26:35] A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft [26:47] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass [26:54] The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank [26:59] A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf [27:02] In Cold Blood by Truman Capote [27:14] The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith [29:13] The Time Machine by H. G. Wells [29:20] The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson [29:23] Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier [29:30] The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood [29:36] The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor [29:45] The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell [30:17] The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman [30:20] The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson [30:23] The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick [30:26] Going to Meet the Man: Stories (with Sonny's Blues) by James Baldwin [30:37] Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (with The Gilded Six-Bits) by Zora Neale Hurston [30:42] Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston [30:54] Kindred by Octavia E. Butler [31:00] Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler [31:08] Books Mentioned During the Retellings Discussion Julia by Sandra Newman [33:38] 1984 by George Orwell [33:40] Hamlet by William Shakespeare [34:10] Emma by Jane Austen [34:24] The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare [34:28] The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson [34:45] Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith [34:51] Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson [35:04] And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie [35:08] The Winters by Lisa Gabriele [35:35] The Odyssey by Homer [36:38] The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller [37:00] Circe by Madeline Miller [37:01] Hogarth Shakespeare series by various authors [37:53] Canongate Myth Series by various authors [37:57] The Austen Project series by various authors [38:00] Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld [38:03] Naamah by Sarah Blake [38:56] Anna K by Jenny Li [40:10] Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy [40:20] Tom Lake by Ann Patchett [40:41] Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor [42:36] Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes [44:14] Marmee by Sarah Miller [44:17] Little Women by Louisa May Alcott [44:22] Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell [44:38] Ruth's Journey: A Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind by Donald McCaig [44:40] Pride by Ibi Zoboi [45:19] Other Links The Atlantic | Italo Calvino's 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic by Maria Popova (July 7, 2012) Novel Pairings | The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (February 27, 2024) About Sara Hildreth Website | Instagram | Facebook  Sara Hildreth is the creator behind FictionMatters, a literary Instagram account, newsletter, and book club focused on putting thought-provoking books into the hands of adventurous readers. She also co-hosts Novel Pairings, a podcast dedicated to making the classics readable, relevant, and fun.

Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about collapse and how talk about it with your family, the history and significance of mirrors, and the vice lists in the Bible and why we have them. Visit our website - A Brief History of Power Many thanks to our sponsors, Blessed Sacrament Lutheran Church in Hayden, ID, and Luther Classical College Dr Koontz - Trinity Lutheran Church Rev Fisk - St Paul Rockford Music thanks to Verny

Beth Broderick cast her spell on us when she starred as Aunt Zelda in "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," but she was making magic happen long before then.From her very first series with Brad Pitt, to her roles in "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Fools Rush In"...Beth's body of work is extensive!She shares so many great stories, from her romance with a huge director, to the person who made her life hell on the set of Sabrina, to her friendship with the late Matthew Perry. Plus, find out what made her quit the biz for five whole years!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jeff Chu, Teacher-in-Residence

Welcome back to Not A Bomb podcast! This is the show where we re-examine some of the biggest bombs in cinematic history and see if they deserve a second chance. In this episode, discuss the 1990 comedy (??) - The Bonfire of the Vanities. Coming from the legendary director Brian De Palma, The Bonfire of the Vanities attempts to adapt the best-selling novel of the same name. However, problem after problem caused this film to fail at the box office and get hammered by the critics. The problems were so epic, a film critic wrote a bestselling book about all the behind-the-scenes drama, “The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco.” As a bonus feature, we sneak in a quick review of a 2015 documentary on the director himself, De Palma.We are excited to welcome John from And Now Something A Little Bit Different YouTube Channel to help break down this utter failure.The Bonfires of the Vanities is directed by Brian De Palma and stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman, Kim Cattrall, Saul Rubinek, and F. Murray Abraham.If you want to leave feedback or suggest a movie bomb, please drop us a line at NotABombPod@gmail.com or Contact Us - here. Also, if you like what you hear, leave a review on Apple Podcast.Please sure to check out John's YouTube Channel - And Now For Something A Little Bit Different. Cast: Brad, Troy, John

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyWriter Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?Further Reading:Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," New York Magazine, June 1972— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)— A Man in Full (1998)— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017