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Boston Globe
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Madonna's crosses, Scorcese's temptations: why did so much art in the 80s talk about God?
It was a hinge year. The previous decades' protest and countercultural movements left fertile ground for creativity, as artists from Warhol's associate Basquiat and musicians from U2 to Madonna to Leonard Cohen to the Smiths began to produce a flood of what Elie terms 'crypto-religious' art. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Crypto-religious art, in my formulation, is work that uses [religious] imagery, motif, theme, and patterns but in a way that expresses something other than conventional religious belief,' Elie says. Encounters with this type of work tend to invite listeners and viewers and readers to question our own beliefs — particularly when the work also introduces tension between the spiritual and the sexual. 'The second Vatican council in the 1960s changed many things,' Elie says, 'and one was to empower ordinary Catholics to use their own consciences to make decisions,' especially about their own sexual lives. While the emerging freedom sought by the city's LGBTQ population was often at odds with religious establishments, regular lay Christians understood that when Prince sang 'I would die for U,' he was speaking as your lover and as your savior. Advertisement Not surprisingly, this work attracted anger from institutional religious forces, and far too many churches saw the devastating AIDS crisis burning through New York's artistic community as validation for their fear and hatred. And yet, the art created in New York in the 1980s, in all its messy duality of saints and sinners, has endured over the past four decades. Elie suggests that past is prologue. 'In the 80s you had a very worldly president making common cause with the religious right and exalting wide-open capitalism, and the media rushing to consecrate it as the age of Reagan,' he says. 'So now you have a very worldly president making common cause with a religious right, and a wide-open capitalism, and the media rushing to consecrate the age of Trump. But to speak of the variety and vigor and vitality and power of the work that was produced in those times is to know that it can happen now.' Paul Elie will read at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 29, at And now for some recommendations…. Ocean Vuong's ' Advertisement Stephen King writes too many books for so many of them to continue to be this good. In the witty and propulsive ' Caroline Fraser won big praise for her previous book, 'Prairie Fires,' which told the dual story of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the daughter whose behind-the-scenes work helped make her mother an icon. In ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books pages. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Boston Globe
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A novel for kids tells the true story of a newspaper for dogs
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up When Lobestine decided to write a children's novel about their adventures, the real Sophie, now a student at Emerson, jumped right in. 'She's so creative,' says Lobestine. 'I talked to her a little bit about it, and then we decided to do an artist retreat — some friends of ours own a farm in Vermont and they invited us to come. I was working on the book and she was really into being a filmmaker in high school so she made these two short documentaries. She continues to be this amazingly creative person and I've seen her really come into her own.' Advertisement 'The Barking Puppy' is meant to entertain and delight, like any other middle-grade novel — Lobestine says she was 'just smitten with how fun the story could be' — but the author also hopes it inspires its readers, if not to start their own newspapers, to at least 'lean into their passions.' Advertisement 'I wanted the book to model a lot of different ways to be yourself,' she adds, 'and to show how a community can be a place where we have room for each other, where we hold each other up.' Lobi Lobestine will read at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 24, at the And now for some recommendations…. Lydia Millet is one of our finest fiction writers, a cool chronicler of an overheating planet and a master at melding history in humor in novels like 'Oh Pure and Radiant Heart' and 'A Children's Bible.' ' Tech-driven visions of the future have always had a high error rate (I am still looking around for the robot housemaid promised to me by the Jetsons). But as Silicon Valley grows in political influence, the fantastic plans promulgated by industry leaders have begun to influence policy and government budgets. This isn't great, as science journalist Adam Becker points out in ' Advertisement In ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Boston Globe
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Befuddled by ‘adulting'? Gretchen Rubin has some words of wisdom for you!
All are among the aphorisms collected in her latest book, ' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Rubin's been writing aphorisms for years, she says, these distilled, potent portions of wisdom. Many are about big issues, from desire to creativity to persistence, while others are simpler life hacks ('If you don't like a pair of pants, don't pay to get them hemmed'). Advertisement She knows that not everyone will agree with all of them. 'There are some where I'm like, 'do I believe that?' Or I go back and forth.' Many come from folk wisdom expressed in Rubin's own words. 'A lot of big important truths are too important to be new,' Rubin adds, 'it's more about freshness and finding a new way to express an idea.' She especially loves when someone reads or hears an aphorism and says, 'I've had that feeling many times myself, but I just never quite stopped to put it into words. But now, that's exactly what I think, too!'' Ideally, Rubin adds, the book is 'a springboard. We're all just looking for a way to share what you've learned with other people, especially your children. Usually we have to learn [about life] the hard way. But sometimes, somebody can get you through it a little bit easier.' Gretchen Rubin will read 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, at the . Advertisement And now from some recommendations . . . In ' Ariel Courage's ' ' Rachel Phan's delightful new memoir, ' Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Boston Globe
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A train goes off the rails in Paris, and we get vivid portraits of the people onboard
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In ' Advertisement 'I loved setting myself a sort of discipline of trying to find as many real people as possible who were in France in the 1890s and saying, what if they were on my train, how might their day have gone?' Donoghue says. 'I didn't have to go to any great lengths to try and make the range of characters diverse — 1890s Paris was this international hub. It was just like a casting call of lively people. It was lovely to sort of pay homage to the city.' Emma Donoghue will read at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 17, at in South Hadley. And now for some recommendations . . . Advertisement Scarily relevant, Clay Risen's ' ' (Scribner) transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s. America had led the Allies to victory over the Nazis, but alongside postwar peace and prosperity the country grappled with paranoid conspiracies that saw enemies everywhere. Risen, a New York Times journalist, vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar. In ' ' (Riverhead), his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah revisits his native Tanzania to tell the interlocking stories of three young people whose lives are on the brink of transformation. Another thoughtful and deeply moving book by a master storyteller. Stephen Graham Jones has a growing fanbase that includes fellow writers like Tommy Orange and Stephen King. In ' ' (Simon & Schuster), his latest, Jones blends horror and history to tell the story of a vampire who walks the lands of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, seeking revenge for a massacre by whites that left 217 Blackfeet dead. ' ' (One World) by Nicole Cuffy is a gorgeously written literary excavation of belonging and belief. The novel toggles between the narrative of a bereaved young man who finds himself drawn into a community that may be a cult and the mysterious leader whose own history was indelibly marked by his time serving in the American military during the Vietnam War. Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Cynthia Weiner revisits 1980s NYC and her own youth
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In writing 'A Gorgeous Excitement,' Weiner says she wanted to recreate a particular time and place — a much looser and more freewheeling New York in the 1980s — when she and her friends explored the city and often faced much more danger, whether from drugs or from men, than they understood. 'I wanted to create a character who would be in that same sort of innocent state or naive state and have no sense of what kind of danger she might be in,' she says. 'I wanted to capture that mood of dread.' Advertisement At the time, Weiner points out, the drinking age was still 18 in some areas (and easily skirted with fake IDs) and cocaine was prevalent. 'It was so popular and available in the ′80s, which does seem crazy looking back,' she says. 'You'd go to a bar and there'd be lines on the table.' For Weiner, her friends, and the book's main characters, parents weren't exactly on top of what their teenagers were doing. 'It was such a different time,' she says. 'We didn't have cellphones. Parents didn't know where their kids were; they had no idea.' Advertisement Cynthia Weiner will read at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, at . And now for some recommendations . . . In ' ' (Celadon) Elon Green (whose previous book, ' Elissa Altman's memoirs have plumbed the author's break from her childhood religion (' ' ' (David Godine), Altman shares what she's learned about overcoming shame and fear to write boldly about what's at the heart of one's life. A writing guide, yes — but this book goes well beyond craft advice into the realm of life lessons. Chris Bohjalian has been writing top-notch historical novels and thrillers for ages — I particularly like ' ' ' (Doubleday) brings all the propulsive plot and sensitive character development one has come to expect from Bohjalian; here, he spins a tale of unlikely romance between a wounded Union soldier from Vermont and a gritty Virginia woman whose husband has left her in charge of the family gristmill while he fights on the Confederate side. Advertisement Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
