Faint light from the streetlamp outside threaded the curtains, casting my bedroom ceiling the color of a bruise. For hours, I had lain in bed, staring at the dark pooling around me. Soon enough, the day would break, and I would need to pick up the shards of the night to do all my various jobs: packing lunches, finding lost socks, getting my kids to school, and then, eventually, hopefully, making any progress on the book I’d been paid to write. But I knew by this point, having had many such nights in recent weeks, that this insomnia would cast my day in a haze, would turn my brain into something resembling the oatmeal I needed to get up and make.
What had started these weeks of sleeplessness was, in fact, good news: while working on my book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and An American Inheritance, I won the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a prestigious award that meant I now had sufficient funds to complete my project and do it well. I feared it also meant that people might actually read the book when it was published.
For those who don't want the bread component of a breakfast sandwich but also don't have the leisure to sit and enjoy a bowl or cereal or oatmeal, the egg bite might be the perfect compromise. That's one of the reasons I opted to start eating them. As a New Jersey native, I am truly a fiend for bagels of every shape and size. Trying to minimize my bagel count (which could truly be an unconscionable amount per week) became a much easier taste once egg bites came into my life.
Maureen Ryan is as mad as hell about what’s been happening in Hollywood. And the Vanity Fair contributing editor has written Burn It Down to tell readers why. “What should be assessed is not just the creative product, its financial cost, and its efficiency (or lack thereof),” she writes, “It’s also how productive and nurturing an environment it is.” Something that she goes to great lengths to explain isn’t happening now and never has been.
Her book, which deals mainly but not exclusively with the world of television, was written before the recent strikes by the American Writers and Screen Actors Guilds and doesn’t deal directly with the specific issues that have provoked them. But it does point to a range of resentments that have been simmering away for years, to do with how workplaces that ought to service the needs of employees have frequently become hellholes.
If there is a single takeaway, it is that Tolhurst views goth as interdisciplinary — an ideology that spans different art forms, mediums and generations, one that shape-shifts with whoever finds interest in it.
The book is most compelling when Schwarzenegger writes from his own perspective, a voice that valorizes both intellectual curiosity and the thrill of getting absolutely shredded. The charm offensive even (or especially) works when he’s tiptoeing the line of self-parody, such as comparing himself taking on “Kindergarten Cop” post-“The Terminator” to Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel after sculpting “David.” Somehow, I found myself assenting. Sure. I buy it.