Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088

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There was a time when a com­pa­ny like Volk­swa­gen could com­mis­sion var­i­ous lumi­nar­ies to write let­ters to the future, then pub­lish them in Time mag­a­zine as part of an ad cam­paign. In fact, that time was­n’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be pre­cise, when no less an opti­mistic (or opti­misti­cal­ly…

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets & Critics

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For long­time read­ers of Amer­i­can book jour­nal­ism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-pub­lished list of the 100 best books of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry will sum­mon dim mem­o­ries of many a once-unig­nor­able crit­i­cal fuss. At one time or anoth­er over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could…

Francis Ford Coppola Picks His Favorite Criterion Movies & Gives Advice to Filmmakers

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Upon step­ping into the hal­lowed Cri­te­ri­on Clos­et, stocked with hun­dreds of that cinephile video label’s finest releas­es, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la speaks of a direc­tor who “believed in a film he want­ed to make, and used his entire for­tune, because the financ­ing sys­tem of the time would­n’t finance it. And it came out and it was…

Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” On His Holiday Radio Show (2006)

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Allow me to name just a few of the peo­ple I want to hear host­ing and curat­ing radio shows—former Sex Pis­tols’ singer John Lydon, for­mer Clash front­man Joe Strum­mer, for­mer Woody Guthrie imper­son­ator Bob Dylan.…

Luck­i­ly for me, this ain’t just fan­ta­sy base­ball; at var­i­ous times, and with vary­ing lev­els of com­mit­ment, each of these…

How A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Its Beloved Soundtrack Album, Almost Never Happened

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A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas uses a cast of ama­teur child voice actors, deals with the theme of sea­son­al depres­sion, and cul­mi­nates in the recita­tion of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the spe­cial that CBS had expect­ed, to say noth­ing of its spon­sor, the Coca-Cola Com­pa­ny.…