At the New York Times, Jesse Green looks at how theater is portrayed in movies, books, and television.
At The Guardian, Elif Shafak reflects on anger, righteousness, and what is needed to create lasting change. “When progressive-minded people say we must make anger our primary motivation, I flinch a little,” she writes. “While the beginning of anger might feel wonderful, the rest of it is, in fact, quite toxic, repetitive, shallow and backward.”
The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan wonders why Ivanka Trump, a White House senior advisor, is still being treated solely like the president’s daughter and lists questions that should have been asked on her recent Face the Nation appearance.
The Guardian looks at the bestselling books of 2019. The New York Times looks forward to the books being published in 2020.
Julia Alvarez, Virginia Kantra, Anna Quindlen, Sonia Sanchez, and Jennifer Weiner reflect on Little Women and how the book and films have influenced them. “The March girls were white New Englanders, and we were newly arrived immigrants from a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, but there the differences stopped and the uncanny similarities began,” writes Alvarez. “Wow, what an accurate portrayal of sisterhood and all its complexities. What a critical story for us at this juncture in our lives, when we, too, were facing so many changes, losses, challenges to the certainties we had known.”
