Three federal government agencies have been targets in the culture wars for decades: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Their funding is tiny by federal standards – about $148 million each for the NEA and NEH, and about $445 million for […]
Around the World in 80 Days is a stage version of what is very likely the most popular novel by Jules Verne, the prolific 19th century grandfather of technological fiction, by which I mean fiction dependent upon and heavily influenced by then-current or just slightly futuristic technology as distinguished from science-fiction that is more speculative. The […]
Murder at the Howard Johnson’s tries to be a nostalgic look back to the late 1970s when leisure suits, the sexual revolution and proto-New Age gurus were the thing, but as a relic actually written in 1979 and set in 1978 it never achieves the necessary distance needed for genuine reflection. People did a lot of […]
An annual event since 1998, the Providence French Film Festival will be held this February 25 through March 4, with all screenings at the Cable Car Cinema. Although the event is presented by Brown University, the films are not academically oriented and are open to the public. Richard Blakely, director of the festival, credited Dan Kamil, […]
The deceptively humble bagel is a culinary art form: bagel connoisseurs are notorious for their exacting demands for just the right hard crust, just the right soft interior, and of course just the right taste. An entire literary subgenre can be found complaining about how there is nowhere to get a good bagel outside of […]
In its eighth consecutive year, the Providence Children’s Film Festival will run a series of feature films and short film packages February 17-26. The festival uses a number of venues throughout the city, including AS220, the Avon Cinema, the Gilder Center for the Arts, the Metcalf Auditorium, the Providence Athenæum and the RISD Auditorium, as […]
Epic Theatre Company has announced “a series of programs designed to respond to the country’s political climate,” beginning on Sunday, January 22, with a one-off performance of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? by Eric Russell Bentley, a 1972 play that uses the the real words of questions and answers in testimony before […]
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of the most well-known and recognizable plays of the past century. The film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives was the third highest grossing release of 1958, and the vision of Taylor, widely acknowledged as one of the classic feminine beauties of the era, […]
Anyone who has lost a child or a sibling to premature death finds the experience inexplicable and unique, and even parents who lose the same child together will cope differently from each other, sometimes driving a wedge of mutual incomprehension between them. No one can truly understand the grief of another person, no matter how […]
Life expectancy is a measurement that summarizes almost everything about quality of life in a society, and therefore even tiny increases or decreases are indications of profound changes with deep consequences. In a somewhat shocking discovery, life expectancy declined overall in the United States by 0.1 year from 2014 to 2015, according to the Centers […]