I could go awn. We Anglophones wallow in orthographical muck. Attention must be paid.
The Singaporean supper joint clamors with sex like no other late-night eatery in any country I’ve been to or lived in. Look again at the above, and see what simmers below. University students with their crushes, frustrated young adults who can’t take each other back to their parents’ places, uncles looking to buy sex, and the people who sell it. Back when clubs were still open and drinking spots didn’t all but shut down at 10:30 p.m., people were cozying up under the buzzing fans, the bare light, of Spize, Maxwell, BK Eating House, too.
It’s that time between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., in that strange, lulling space between dinner and breakfast. You’re filled with desire to hold onto a day that’s already passed, but not yet finished. You text a friend: “awake? hungry? can pick me?” Just a bite of something before you can go to sleep. You need food, you need people. So you eat.
The line between art and agitprop can be narrow, and rarely more so than in Hollywood, where people sometimes struggle to know (or care) what art is to begin with.
This notion hovers behind Anthony Marra’s elegant new novel, “Mercury Pictures Presents,” in which Artie Feldman, the improbably endearing vulgarian who runs the book’s titular studio — the sort of B-movie factory that flourished in the slipstream of Hollywood’s majors during the Golden Age 1930s and ’40s — keeps his toupee collection displayed in his office and has never met a bad idea he didn’t love.
Katie Hafner’s taut and utterly delightful debut is a novel of multitudes. It is travel escapism, a family drama, a character study, social commentary on pandemic isolation and an incredible journey back to center. We are emerging from a period of forced introversion, and “The Boys” provides the perfect antidote. For anyone who now feels anxious about leaving the house or traveling abroad or re-entering the world, you will find, as I did, a kindred spirit in Ethan Fawcett.
When the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, electronic computer, known as ENIAC, debuted in 1946, great fanfare was given to the men who created it, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., among others.
But little attention was given to six women who played big parts behind the scenes, spending months figuring out how to program the computer with little more to go on than diagrams of the huge, complicated machine.