“Whistler” by Ann Patchett opens with what seems like a meet-cute: In a city of 8.58 million people, Daphne Fuller, the protagonist, runs into a man from her past at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Except the man is old, and he is following her.
“Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth” by Daisy Hernández attempts to define what it means to be a citizen by braiding together vignettes from her childhood in an immigrant household against the backdrop of U.S. immigration policy. In an interview, Hernández said she thinks of a memoir as an “entryway into the history and political context, because that’s where you’re going to have the feelings.” Hernández is a queer daughter of a Colombian mother and a father who fled Cuba as a political refugee.
Ray Bradbury once wrote, “You fail only if you stop writing.” The best writing advice is simply to write but, as generative AI has risen, it has soured many people’s taste for putting pen to paper and turning imagination into story. Author Christopher Golden (LA’89) stands firmly against the AI trend.
“Love Story” (2026) opens outside a nail salon, where swarms of paparazzi wait to catch a glimpse of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (Sarah Pidgeon). The camera flashes through the window and reflects onto her freshly painted red nails, but the moment the nail technician finishes, Bessette asks for a neutral shade instead. No mundane moment involving Bessette escaped public intrigue, least of all the heated ones. Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr.’s (Paul Anthony Kelly) arguments were splashed across magazines while paparazzi camped outside their apartment around the clock. As the season progresses and Bessette grows more entangled with both JFK Jr. and the limelight surrounding him, one begins to see this opening scene as illustrative of a woman being controlled by the public eye, down to the color of her nails.
To sit in the dark of Tufts’ Balch Arena Theater for 2 1/2 hours, watching a musical spun from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” might sound like an exercise in masochism. Yet the experience turns out to be something far more delightful: a Russophilic, surprisingly tender and wonderfully inventive piece of theatrical adaptation.
We’re seeing more and more fake people in our lives, from AI interviewers to social media scammers to automated customer service agents. And now, potentially, we’ll see them on the big screen.
