In many ways, the artistic milieu that characterized 1970s New York is still being replicated today. Walk long enough around any neighborhood with hipsters, and you’re bound to find the likes of Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Fran Leibowitz on a coffee shop table or bookstore display.
Making an appearance on the “Hot Ones” YouTube series back in October 2024, Jaylen Brown elucidated one of the best insights on the game of basketball I’ve ever heard. “I look at basketball as like poetry in motion, which is music, and everybody is playing their own song,” Brown commented to host Sean Evans. “Everybody samples from different artists, and they’re playing their own song and if you wanna stop them you gotta study their rhythm.”
Sometime in the spring of 2025, Ray Feinleib found himself in a tough situation. Needing only one more course to complete a bachelor’s degree in film and media studies at Tufts in the twilight of his academic career, Feinleib had chosen to take “Advanced Documentary.” Yet, on the weekend before spring break, with the class’ final project’s due date set for the first week back, he found himself with nothing.
It’s fitting that the last lyric of Bad Bunny’s record-breaking 2025 album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is “¡Viva!” — or in English, “Long live!” It’s the resounding final exclamation of “LA MuDANZA,” a track that begins as an intimate ballad — a retelling of the tender love story from global superstar Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio of his parents — and then, in a heartbeat, erupts into a raucous, full-throated anthem. Piano, bass, congas, bongos and horns collide, igniting a sound that, as with the 16 tracks before it, channels the soul of Puerto Rico and its people.
Baseball is a truly evil sport. I have chosen to open my column with this sentence for many reasons, which I will try to sum up here in terms of my horrific experience with the 2025 MLB season.
A new cinematic canon may very well be emerging. Films like “One Battle After Another,” “Civil War” and “Eddington” have all painted unique yet not dissimilar portraits of a discordant, extremism-prone America — a vision that seems increasingly resonant under Donald Trump’s second term. Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” a paranoid pressure cooker of a thriller that’s as weird as any of the Greek director’s previous works, is yet another film that shares this vision.
No event unites Americans like one that provokes fear. A prominent historical example of this came on the morning of Jan. 13, 2018, when thousands of Hawaiians received a harrowing message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” As we know now, this was simply a false alarm — no such missile existed, and everything was fine.
In his 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” political scientist Robert Putnam writes that, “American history carefully examined is a story of ups and downs in civic engagement, not just downs — a story of collapse and of renewal.”
The job hunt is never easy. In today’s world of LinkedIn connections, coffee chats and endless interviews, the search for work can drive even a modest family man to madness — or worse. At least that’s the opinion of Park Chan-wook, the visionary behind “Oldboy” (2003) and “The Handmaiden” (2016), whose latest work, “No Other Choice” (2025), proves to be a hysterical, scathing portrait of modern capitalism.
There comes a point in many directors’ careers when making a sprawling passion project seems to be the natural progression. For Francis Ford Coppola, it was the tumultuous “Megalopolis.” For Steven Spielberg, it was the autobiographical “The Fabelmans.” And now, for three-time Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, that career-defining victory lap arrives with “Frankenstein” (2025). The most recent entry into a canon of adaptations that ranges from James Whale’s 1931 original to Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedic spin, Del Toro’s version is a sturdy yet relatively risk-averse take on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel.
