Pennywise is one of the most recognizable figures in the horror genre, right up there with Dracula and Frankenstein, or even a more recent frightful icon like Freddy Krueger. Originating in the pages of Stephen King's massive 1986 novel "It," this evil entity which likes to disguise itself as a sinister dancing clown has been terrifying audiences for decades. In 1990, a television miniseries starring the legendary Tim Curry as Pennywise was broadcast, causing an entire generation to develop coulrophobia.
Interestingly enough (given Pennywise's slumber cycle), 27 years later, a massive big-screen adaptation of the first half of King's book (that's how hefty the thing is) was released in theaters and became a blockbuster. With the success of part one, a sequel was released, called "It: Chapter Two." While not as strong as its predecessor, the second half of the clown's saga was enough of a success to prove that audiences just couldn't get enough of this interdimensional beast.
When I was little, I used to watch my Ammachi cook in her suburban-Ottawa bungalow, where the family gathered to enjoy these traditional Malayali dishes. I often found myself hoping I could replicate them once I got older. But, the more I think about the future, the more I worry about how difficult it will be to sustainably access the ingredients I would need to assemble these meals.
Inside the tiny shop, customers take their pick from a roster of signature ice cream and sherbet flavors that includes best sellers like Swiss orange chip, cookies and cream, and sticky chewy chocolate. Jim Laughlin, Campana’s son-in-law, has been the head ice cream maker since 2020 and shared that the shop makes about 150 gallons of ice cream every day. Customers can spot him preparing large batches of fresh ice cream by the entrance window.
“People don't realize that we make ice cream here,” Laughlin shares with a laugh. “Every single drop of ice cream has been made in-house since 1948. We're really proud of that.”
Colson Whitehead once wrote that all it took to belong in New York City was an act of remembrance—the summoning of a piece of the city that no longer existed. “You are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge,’” he wrote. “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” Whitehead wrote this essay in 2001 and it’s easy to understand why he was reflecting on what was missing: Two towers had left the skyline, and 2,977 people were gone with them.
Two decades later, an author has again taken stock of the city’s relationship with memory. His name is Zain Khalid, and his debut novel, Brother Alive, feels like the first since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that captures the mood of New York right now, describing a wounded city where, rather than holding on to what’s gone, residents are eager to rid themselves of the recent past.
Based on interviews with 40 active fiction reviewers for major newspapers, Phillipa K. Chong’s study Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times is a game attempt to survey a flagging field of cultural commentary that’s undergoing fundamental shifts. It is an index of Chong’s discernment that she has focused on one of the few intriguing spaces that her profession (she is a cultural sociologist at McMaster University in Canada) has yet to examine seriously, and one from which there is plenty of sociological conjecture to be harvested. Book critics anxiously assert their authority, yet evince uncertainty regarding whether anybody else agrees that they have it. The uncertainty of the critic’s place in American culture is present from the first pages of Chong’s study: A woman with “a review career that spans decades…for the most important and influential newspapers in North America” tells Chong in her interview that the idea of her possibly being a “tastemaker” is laughable. The scene neatly illustrates the challenges faced by external analysts in their attempts to decode a world as insular and disingenuous as literary criticism. But it also points to unspoken cultural tensions that inhibit a more candid attitude toward one’s own authority: In what sort of society would such a powerful tastemaker feel compelled to present themselves as something less?
If you plan on reading James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” — and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do — you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them. Have your people on speed dial, ready to go. And make sure you set aside a good amount of time for reading. You probably won’t be reading this book once. You’ll want to read it several times. This book is going to stretch you.
“I honored their elegies rather than the continuing presence of vital, fluid cultures,” Savoy writes of the child-self that once believed in what Dina Gilio-Whitaker calls the “myth of the vanishing Indian.” I once believed that to be hyphenated was to be less than whole, that to be part of the diaspora meant that a part of me, and my family, was irrevocably lost to migration, extinct and extinguished, gone. But if “home lies in ‘re-membering,’” then home is not a place, but an action, an ongoing process. To traverse land is to trace the steps of your forebears, and to travel in search of heritage is to access our past by living fiercely in the present and finding what stories live there.