The Young Dramaturgs

“‘Once I bring myself to rehearsal,’ thinks the young dramaturg, ‘what if I fail? What if someone stumps me? What if I don’t know how a late nineteenth-century Russian family would have eaten pierogie [as a big pie, by the way], or the year the Berlin Wall went up [1961]?'”

The Singer That Arthur Godfrey Fired Live On The Air Has Died At 86

“[Julius] La Rosa was in the Navy when Godfrey heard him sing and invited him to appear on his CBS TV show. After his discharge, Mr. La Rosa became a star of Godfrey’s show from 1951 to 1953, recording several hits including ‘Eh, Cumpari.’ Godfrey liked to exert control over his entertainers, making demands and restricting their outside work in return for exposure on his popular show.”

Could You Survive Without Your CDs?

“The Herculean task of searching through the rack, putting a disc in a machine, ejecting it to wipe the fingerprint that made it skip through track two and then putting it into the machine again felt so arduous in this new world that it may as well have predated the industrial revolution.”

Science Fiction Appears To Be Converging With, Well, Now

“The possibility that sci-fi could be breaking in favor of the near-future is especially surprising, given that prophetic boldness has often been seen as one of the genre’s signal features. If, as the critic Northrop Frye has argued, the job of science fiction has been ‘to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery,’ what does it mean that so much recent sci-fi has been taking place on a plane that’s relatively proximate to ours?”