The Party Is Cancelled

Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. The first is that you have to be willing to break bread with people who have been socially ostracized, or, as the attendees would say, “cancelled”—whether they’ve lost a job, lost friends, or simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions. Some people on the guest list are notorious: élite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or who have broken university rules, and journalists who have made a name for themselves amid public backlash (or who have weathered it quietly). Others are relative nobodies, people who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.The second rule of the gatherings is that Pamela has to like you. Pamela is Pamela Paresky, the gathering’s organizer, a fifty-six-year-old psychologist who lives in Chelsea.Emma Green, The New Yorker

The Eight Mountains – a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

insomma, è piaciuto molto!

In search of lost time

Forty years ago, on a spring night in April 1983, a thief bypassed security at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, entering the building under the cover of darkness. The burglar stole 106 rare clocks worth tens of millions of dollars, then vanished without a trace.

The crime had all the elements of a high-stakes drama: a mysterious theft, befuddled investigators, a romance that spanned decades and outlasted a prison sentence, and two bequeathments of valuable timepieces (among them a pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette).

In the two decades following the theft, authorities made little progress on the investigation. The heist seemed like a mystery that would never be solved—until a deathbed confession by a career criminal led to the recovery of almost all of the missing timepieces. Fern Reiss, Smithsonian

e un'altra curiosità:

How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism helped create American gay identity, Blake Smith, Tablet

Judy Blume Forever

Suddenly Judy Blume is everywhere. Not that the author who carried so many of us through adolescence is ever far from our minds; she tends to be my personal Jiminy Cricket, a gentle conscience asking the same question of every sentence I type: Is it honest?

But now, the creator of “Superfudge,” “Deenie,” “The Pain and the Great One” and so many other beloved novels is having her biggest week since “In the Unlikely Event” came out in 2015. “Judy Blume Forever,” a documentary about her life, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the movie version of her 52-year-old novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” came out on Friday.