‘The Float Test' is a family drama threaded with foreboding
After their mother — a fearless attorney and demanding parent — dies of a stroke while out for her morning run, the four Kenner siblings gather with their father in Florida to mourn her passing. Much alcohol and awkwardness are involved, as there are long-held grudges to tend to; for instance, no one is speaking to Fred (short for Winnifred) for several reasons, most having to do with her using the family's foibles as fodder for her four novels. She's increasingly dissatisfied with the whole business of being a writer; the books have alienated her from family and friends, and they aren't even selling.
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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
The Costumes of ‘The Gilded Age' Are a Part of Real Life History
LONDON — Costume designer Kasia Walicka Maimone grew up with Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' in her native Poland. The Russian classic is part of her 'cellular structure' and she recently reread the novel set in the late 19th century. The period has had a lasting impact on her and it's also the time frame of the HBO series 'The Gilded Age,' about New York City's elite as they shuffle from opera houses to fancy luncheons and beyond. More from WWD From Runway to Silver Screen: Sara Sampaio on Embracing Chaos, Comedy and Her 'Superman' Debut Dominique Thorne: Bringing Ironheart to Life and Inspiring a New Generation of Heroes Anne Hathaway Revives Andy Sachs in Jean Paul Gaultier Look on 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' Set Maimone has been working on the historical drama for over five years and nothing is short of grandeur as she costumes characters based on New York's famous families: the Astors, the Goelets, the Livingstons, the Van Rensselaers and the Vanderbilts. 'I live in New York and it's such a celebration of the city and getting to know the history of New York intimately,' she said in an interview, detailing that she works on 5,000 to 7,000 costumes a season with her team, which on a regular day is made up of 65 people and can go up to 200 on a big shoot day. Now for the third season, Maimone has had to look beyond the fashions and parameters of the city, as Gladys Russell, played by Taissa Farmiga, marries into British aristocracy and becomes a duchess. Her character takes inspiration from Consuelo Vanderbilt's marriage to Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. Gladys clashes with the duke's sister, Lady Sarah, played by Hattie Morahan, as she teaches her a new way of life in England and living in a country house. 'My obligation is to make sure that each character is different and that they are defined by what they are wearing. It was very obvious what to do with Lady Sarah, she needs to be zipped up and conservative. She continuously [wears] a riding outfit with classic lines, which clashes with Gladys' newest fashions,' Maimone said. Lady Sarah is costumed up to the neck in dull tones and sharp collars, while Gladys arrives at Sidmouth Castle wearing dresses made from red and turquoise lace, yellow jacquard and baby blue tartan. Gladys is a mirror of her mother, Bertha Russell, a fictionalized version of Alva Vanderbilt, a newcomer in New York City society who is clawing her way to the top with extravagance and somewhat bad taste to the old guards of the city. The Russell family's costumes are daring and years ahead of their time. 'The old guard famously bought the same dresses from the House of Worth and then kept them in the closets for two years until the seasonalism quietened, but Bertha has no problem with that kind of bad taste as she's happy to manifest it,' Maimone said. It's what Gladys does when she arrives in England — in one scene, she wears diamond stars in her hair — that Lady Sarah frowns upon. Maimone also understands that not everything is historically accurate — there's always going to be an element of entertainment. 'We crank it up a bit more than what it would have been in real life and that's my job. There's a playfulness with the material,' she explained. Her research into 19th-century New York fashion is as detailed as any history degree and spans across texts, books, magazines and art. Many of Gladys' costumes take their cues from the paintings of the American artist John Singer Sargent, who painted Consuelo Vanderbilt a few times during his lifetime. Maimone's attention to detail is precise — even to the secondary or one-off characters, such as Madame Dashkova, a spiritual medium, or Monica O'Brien, Bertha's sister. 'She communicates with animals and she's wearing a fox paw on her chest that she talks to. It was just a really fabulous exploration of what to do with a fortune teller,' she said, adding that in the case of O'Brien's arrival in her old rags, it was about instantly letting viewers know that there was a history and disconnect between the sisters before they even came into contact with each other. Nothing is put to waste on the expansive set of 'The Gilded Age,' not even the costumes. Maimone reuses all the pieces for the house staff and with the menswear she makes additional tweaks every season to move the costumes forward with the time period. This season, Agnes van Rhijn, played by Christine Baranski, rewears many of her old dresses since losing her fortune and being dependent on her sister, Ada Forte, played by Cynthia Nixon, who has come into wealth but doesn't change her costumes that much as she's still in mourning. The costumes of the show are a reflection of the storyline — many of the pieces are made in New York, but some are specially designed in Europe for the main characters. But New York seems to hold a special place in Maimone's résumé. She costumed the 2005 film 'Capote,' based on Truman Capote, and the crime drama 'A Most Violent Year,' depicting '80s New York. 'I studied English in Warsaw and when I graduated, I was quite lost and ended up living in New York City surrounded by this community of artists, who were extremely passionate about what they were doing. It was an awakening moment and I had been making clothes since I was a kid, so I ended up going to FIT, where I realized that [fashion] was the most natural language that I had and it was the first time that school ever made sense in my life,' she said. Maimone had a hand working in theater and with dance companies and operas at that time and found her calling. 'I quickly noticed that I belong so much more in storytelling than in fashion because I'm very passionate about stories and discovering new worlds,' she said, remembering 'Life Situations: Daydreams on 'Giselle,'' a production she worked on with the modern dance choreographer Donald Byrd in 1995. All roads lead back to the opera or stage for Maimone, who is costuming the upcoming biopic 'Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,' starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Best of WWD Fashion Meets Cinema: Jaws 50th Anniversary and Calvin Klein Spring 2019 RTW Show Retro Glamour: Giorgio Di Sant'Angelo's Summer 1973 Chic Straw Hat Statement The Story Behind Jackie Kennedy's Cartier Watch: A Royal Gift With 'Traces and Clues of Her Life' Revealed Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Yahoo
Caught on the jumbotron: How literature helps us understand modern-day public shaming
The scene at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts on July 16 was steeped in irony. During Coldplay's 'jumbotron song' — the concert segment where cameras pan over the crowd — the big screen landed on Andy Byron, then-CEO of data firm Astronomer, intimately embracing Kristin Cabot, the company's chief people officer. Both are married to other people. The moment, captured on video and widely circulated on social media, shows the pair abruptly recoiling as Coldplay's lead singer Chris Martin says: 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.' Martin's comment — seemingly light-hearted at the time — quickly took on a different tone as online sleuths identified the pair and uncovered their corporate roles and marital statuses. Within days, Byron resigned from his position as CEO while Cabot is on leave. This spectacle raises a deeper question: why does infidelity, especially among the powerful, provoke such public outcry. Literary tradition offers some insight: intimate betrayal is never truly private. It shatters an implicit social contract, demanding communal scrutiny to restore trust. When trust crumbles publicly French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's notion of 'narrative identity' suggests we make sense of our lives as unfolding stories. The promises we make (and break) become chapters of identity and the basis of others' trust. Betrayal ruptures the framework that stitches private vows to public roles; without that stitch, trust frays. Byron's stadium exposure turned a marital vow into a proxy for professional integrity. Public betrayal magnifies public outcry because leaders symbolize stability; their personal failings inevitably reflect on their institutions. When Astronomer's board stated the expected standard 'was not met,' they were lamenting the collapse of Byron's narrative integrity — and, by extension, their company's. This idea — that private morality underpins public order — is hardly new. In Laws, ancient Greek philosopher Plato described adultery as a disorder undermining family and state. Roman philosopher Seneca called it a betrayal of nature, while statesman Cicero warned that breaking fides (trust) corrodes civic bonds. The social cost of infidelity in literature Literature rarely confines infidelity to the bedroom; its shockwaves fracture communities. French sociologist Émile Durkheim's idea of the 'conscience collective' holds that shared moral norms create 'social solidarity.' As literature demonstrates, violations of these norms inevitably undermines communal trust. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77) dramatizes the social fracture of betrayal. Anna's affair with Count Vronsky not only defies moral convention but destabilizes the aristocratic norms that once upheld her status. As the scandal leads to her ostracization, Anna mourns the social world she has lost, realizing too late that 'the position she enjoyed in society… was precious to her… [and] she could not be stronger than she was.' In Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Emma Bovary's extramarital affairs unravel the networks of her provincial town, turning private yearning for luxury and romance into public contagion. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) makes this explicit: Hester Prynne's scarlet 'A' turns her sin into civic theatre. Public shaming on the scaffold, the novel suggests, delineates moral boundaries and seeks to restore social order — a process that prefigures today's 'digital pillories,' where viral moments subject individuals to mass online judgment and public condemnation. Domestic crumbs and digital scaffolds Contemporary narratives shift the setting but uphold the same principle: betrayal devastates the mundane rituals that build trust. Nora Ephron's autobiographical novel Heartburn (1983), based on her own marriage's collapse to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, weaponizes domesticity. Heartburn's protagonist Rachel Samstat delivers her emotions through recipes — 'Vinaigrette' as a marker of intimacy and betrayal, 'Lillian Hellman's Pot Roast' as a bid for domestic stability and 'Key Lime Pie,' hurled at her cheating husband — become symbols of a life undone by public infidelity. Ephron's satire, later adapted into a film, anticipates our digital age of exposure, where private pain fuels public consumption and judgment. Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (2014), which draws from her own life, shows another perspective: betrayal as quiet erosion. Offill never depicts the affair directly; instead, the husband's absences, silences and an off-hand reference to 'someone else' create a suffocating dread. This indirection shows betrayal's power lies in its latent potential, slowly dismantling a life built on trust before any overt act. Both works underscore betrayal's impact on the collective conscience: a lie fractures a family as fundamentally as a CEO's indiscretion erodes institutional trust. Power magnifies the fallout by turning private failings into public symbols of fragility. Even hidden betrayal poisons the shared rituals binding any group, making the notion of 'private' unsustainable long before any public revelation. The limits of power Literature acknowledges power's protective veneer from consequence — and its limits. Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire (1912–47), modelled on the Gilded Age robber baron Charles Yerkes, follows the rise of financier Frank Cowperwood, whose power shields him — until it doesn't. Even his vast empire proves vulnerable once his adultery becomes public. The very networks that protected him grow wary. Though many critics of the elite are themselves morally compromised in the trilogy, Cowperwood's transgression becomes a weapon to discredit him. His brief exile shows that power may defer, but cannot erase, the costs of betrayal. Once trust fractures, even the powerful become liabilities. They do not fall less often — only more conspicuously. Gender also plays a role in shaping these narratives. Male protagonists like Cowperwood rebound as tragic anti-heroes, their moral failings recast as flaws of character. By contrast, women — think Flaubert's Emma Bovary or Hawthorne's Hester Prynne — are branded cautionary figures, their transgressions stigmatized rather than mythologized. This imbalance in assigning consequences reveals a deeper societal judgment: while broken trust demands repair, the path to restoration often depends on the transgressor's gender. The unblinking eye From Tolstoy's salons to TikTok's scroll, literature offers no refuge from betrayal's ripple effects. When private trust visibly fractures, communal reflexes kick in. Scarlet letters, exile or a CEO's resignation all aim to heal the collective trust. The jumbotron, like Hester's scaffold, is the latest instrument in this age-old theatre of exposure. Jumbotrons. Scaffolds. Same operating system. Same shame. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jason Wang, Toronto Metropolitan University Read more: 'Eat the rich' — Why horror films are taking aim at the ultra-wealthy TikTok may be bad for privacy, but is it also harming our cognitive abilities? Citizens' social media, like Mastodon, can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation Jason Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New York Times
24-07-2025
- New York Times
Esi Edugyan Has a Long List of Canadian Writers to Recommend
In an email interview, the Vancouver Island-based novelist described why being a Booker Prize judge turned out to be surprisingly 'exhilarating.' SCOTT HELLER What's the last great book you read? 'Change,' by Édouard Louis. He writes about how the abandonment of modest roots for a more privileged life can enact a kind of violence on intimate relationships. I read everything he writes. What's your go-to classic? I was 18 when I started reading 'Anna Karenina,' and I continue to read it every few years. I remember how grown up and worldly the characters once seemed. Now they are all so young! Your favorite book no one else knows? 'The Cave,' by the Dutch author Tim Krabbé, is an elegant puzzle of a novel. Do books serve a moral function? How so? They can, but they shouldn't set out to. When readers open themselves up to the intensity of another's experience — even that of an invented person — it can be transformative. Books can leave you feeling less singular, strange and alone, but they can also expose you to a way of being that is completely alien to you, against which to measure your own choices. Novels that are written with a pointed moral or a message are not novels. They are propaganda. Do you consider yourself a writer of historical fiction? Every time I describe myself as a writer of historical fiction, I feel an inward cringe as I sense those unfamiliar with my work picturing scenes of ripped-off bodices and men riding horses across twilit downs. Inevitably when I'm asked again, my reply is always the same. Something in that description must feel true. But I chafe against it. When 'Washington Black' came out, you told The Times that it would be 'daunting' to write a novel set in the present. Are you getting closer to trying? The temptation is still to look to parallels in the past for what's going on now. The past has contours the present simply doesn't possess for me; its throughlines feel more easily grasped and wrestled into a kind of shape. But I think it's probably an important skill to be able to confront the moment as it now appears, somehow. What surprised you most about chairing the Booker Prize panel in 2023? What a healthy state literature is in. You can only hear that the novel is dying so many times before you start to feel cynical about the whole enterprise. Paring down the list became excruciating — our jury had many rigorous conversations from which we all mercifully emerged with our limbs still intact. It was a fascinating, combative, respectful, exhilarating experience. What surprised you most about seeing 'Washington Black' adapted for television? I was struck by how much more externalized the storytelling has to be. This would seem an obvious fact, but it can still surprise you. Because characters' inner worlds can't be accessed as readily, everything must be recreated as surface, as something that can be gleaned visually. And so the set design is ferociously intricate, and multitudes are expressed in a glance or a grimace or the way a masterful actor carries her body. In a novel, the writing is everything. In a series or a film, it is one thread of a larger netting. Tell me about western Canadian writers the wider world should know more about. Patrick Lane was one of our greatest poets — his work is in many ways evocative of Cormac McCarthy. Also wonderful are the short stories of Tamas Dobozy and the novels of Patrick deWitt; Michael Christie's era-spanning 'Greenwood'; Jasmine Sealy's epic 'The Island of Forgetting'; Steven Price's elegant 'Lampedusa'; the beautiful poetry of Lorna Crozier and Jan Zwicky. For canonical works, I'd suggest Sheila Watson's high modernist novel 'The Double Hook,' Jack Hodgins' Vancouver Island stories 'Spit Delaney's Island,' and Joy Kogawa's 'Obasan,' about the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. How do you organize your books? I recently moved house, so my entire book collection is unfortunately boxed in my garage! When I get the shelving up, I'll again arrange things alphabetically, and also by genre. It's the only way to find anything when you've got over 10,000 books. What's the last book you read that made you laugh? Kevin Wilson's 'The Family Fang' is an utter delight. Katherine Heiny's 'Single, Carefree, Mellow' was also a singular pleasure. What books are on your night stand? Ben Lerner's exquisite '10:04,' which I've somehow only just come to; James Fox's 'The World According to Color: A Cultural History'; Percival Everett's 'James'; Alan Hollinghurst's 'Our Evenings'; Katie Kitamura's 'Audition'; and Donatella Di Pietrantonio's 'The Brittle Age.' What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? I've never been able to finish 'Moby-Dick,' an admission made all the more dreadful for the fact that it is my partner's favorite novel. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante — though I fear Tolstoy might spend the evening lecturing us on the world's ills.
