Why The French Want A Law Protecting Bookstores From Amazon

This summer the culture minister “accused Amazon of driving prices down in order to raise them once a monopoly had been secured. The concept is so repellent to national sentiment that an English word has been commandeered to describe it: dumping. … As online sales rise, Amazon has come to be seen in France as le mastodonte américain, the mammoth capitalist interloper rumbling across the Atlantic to trample on the delicacies of culture.”

Is There Any Kind Of Play Marianne Elliott Can’t Direct Brilliantly?

We may know her best for War Horse, but Michael Mopurgo selected her to direct the staging of his book after seeing her production of Shaw’s Saint Joan. She directed Kim Cattrall in Sweet Bird of Youth for Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic, and her National Theatre staging of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seven Olivier Awards.

Film Critic Stanley Kauffmann, 97

“Mr. Kauffmann’s varied careers went from being an actor and a stage manager with a Manhattan repertory company, and as a book editor and a writer of vaguely philosophical novels, before he was named film critic at The New Republic in 1958. His reflective, highly wrought essays appeared weekly for the next 55 years, with a break in 1966, when he was briefly the chief theater critic for The New York Times.”