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Travel + Leisure
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Travel + Leisure
Exclusive: Ben Stiller Says People Who Do This on an Airplane Drive Him ‘Crazy'
Perhaps you thought Ben Stiller's biggest airplane pet peeve would be someone saying 'bomb' like his character did in 'Meet the Parents' or maybe a fellow passenger asking him to do his Blue Steel face from 'Zoolander.' But his real airplane pet peeve is something we have all unfortunately experienced at one time or another: someone taking their socks off and going barefoot during the flight. 'I definitely have experienced that a few times, and look, the reality of it is, you just have to shut it out. But yeah, it really drives me crazy.' Despite a barefooted neighbor or two, Stiller is still in awe of the travel experience after seeing the world as an actor, director, and producer. He remembers the landscapes of Iceland when he was on location for the 2013 film 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' as being particularly incredible. He also recalls traveling to Lagos to scout a film location and just basking in the energy of the Nigerian city. 'It can really take you out of the mindset of when you're in your own world, in terms of giving you perspective on just how many people are living on this planet, living together, and having to interact with each other and make it work. So that always affects me when I go somewhere else, where you see that kind of scope of what's going on.' Scenic mountain road near Seydisfjordur, Iceland, similar to the road Stiller skateboards down in The Secret Life of Walter your go-to drink on an airplane? I will order a diet soda or something on a plane. I remember back in the old days—I grew up in the 70s and 80s—they'd have a bar, like the whole bar, in my parents' generation. What's your travel nightmare? It's really tough, as we all know, when you're traveling in airports because you're at the mercy of these flights changing. My wife [actress Christine Taylor] had a nightmare trying to get back from Hawaii once, where the flight kept on getting canceled, and she was trying to get back to New York. She made friends with this woman from St Louis, and they ended up getting a room together. What's your go-to flight activity? I'll bring a book or a movie, and by 30 minutes into either the book or the movie, I fall asleep. I want to have the security of knowing that I have two books, four movies, three shows that I could watch…and I never watch any of it. Best jet lag tip? The tip that I've heard that works is a cold plunge. Ice-cold plunge when you get somewhere, and I actually like to do that at my house when I come back from traveling. But honestly, with jet lag, the way that I sort of deal with it is I just pretend it doesn't exist. I just try to power through. More recently, he swapped far-flung filming locations for action a little closer to home. This spring, Stiller was a fixture at New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. Viewers at home and in the stadium loved seeing the lifelong fan sitting in the front row, passionately cheering his team on, usually right next to a very emphatic Timothée Chalamet and a rotation of other celebrity fans. He admits that when he traveled for away games in Detroit and Indianapolis, he didn't get quite the same fanfare that he got at home. Ben Stiller and Timothee Chalamet react court-side during the Eastern Conference Finals of the 2025 NBA Playoffs between the Indiana Pacers and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden on May 23, 2025. 'It's pretty crazy. I had never really done that before, when you go into the heart of enemy territory. At Madison Square Garden, they are nice enough to give you court seats sometimes, but when I went to Indianapolis, that was not the case,' he told T+L, laughing. 'It was pretty intense. We got booed. But it was really fun, and I would do it again because I love the Knicks, and they had such a great run the last couple of weeks.' And to purchase those seats in 'enemy territory,' he said he likely used his Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card. Stiller has joined Chase in a campaign to help launch their updated Chase Sapphire Reserve card and introduce the Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business card, along with Erin and Sara Foster, David Chang, and Lionel Boyce. The Chase Sapphire Reserve card is already a favorite among frequent travelers, loved for luxe perks like access to over 1,300 airport lounges and annual credits for hotel stays, dining, and entertainment. 'I think at the end of the day, it's an opportunity to really get more bang for your buck, but also, to have experiences that are helpful with traveling,' Stiller said. As the director and producer of Apple TV's hit show Severance, he said he especially loves that the card comes with a complimentary subscription to Apple TV+.
Chicago Tribune
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Was A.J. Liebling right about Chicago? Decades after the New Yorker's ‘Second City,' time for a second reading
Exactly 100 years ago the New Yorker magazine first landed on newsstands. Its influence on the cultural and civic history of the nation (if not the planet) is hard to overstate. A pair of new doorstop-sized books on my desk prove it: 'A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker 1925-2025,' at 1,119 pages, boasts stories assigned to school kids for generations (Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery,' James Thurber's 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty') and authors who defined decades (Susan Sontag, J.D. Salinger, George Saunders, Alice Munro). 'A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925-2025,' at 959 pages, overflows with so many essential voices of the past 100 years as to be mocking: Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Joy Harjo, Pablo Neruda. And I haven't even mentioned the magazine's milestones of nonfiction — 'Hiroshima,' 'Silent Spring,' the moral accounting of Hannah Arendt, the criticism of Pauline Kael. But then there's 'Chicago: The Second City.' Arguably nothing in 100 years of the New Yorker landed on Chicago with more oomph than A.J. Liebling's infamous 1952 three-part profile of the city. No, wait, strike 'arguably' — that I'm writing this piece soon after my colleague Rick Kogan's piece on how Liebling gave Chicago another nickname and inspired a certain comedy troupe, that alone suggests Liebling got under this city's skin with a precision few can claim. Seventy-five years ago, he moved to the Gold Coast with a new wife and stepdaughter (who enrolled at Frances W. Parker School) in late 1949, stayed through part of 1950 and returned briefly in 1951. New Yorker editor Harold Ross warned him he wouldn't like the Midwest. He didn't. Liebling, who had never been west of Buffalo when he first came here a decade earlier, took the role of the Eastcoaster's Eastcoaster, reflexively judgy, a personification of Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover, 'View of the World From 9th Avenue,' showing a huge Manhattan in the foreground, a smaller empty rectangle of a country after New Jersey, then, just beyond, off in the distance, the Pacific. He deposited on Chicago a catalog of cultural crimes, an unflattering character study, a hair shirt of self-consciousness and a charge of provincialism so gleeful he didn't seem to recognize he was hiding behind New York's own brand of small-mindedness. Trash pickup? . Drinking water? . Chicagoans were too proud. Chicagoans were not proud enough. Local fashion? Dull. Every political ward was a rat's nest of corruption. And my favorite: Lake Michigan was cold. Letters from pissed-off readers flew out of Illinois to Ross and Liebling. One letter reads now like the precursor of social media snark: So aggrieved was this city that, 60 years later, when the Sun-Times' Neil Steinberg wrote his own book-length profile of Chicago, the title came from an especially biting insult lobbed by one of Liebling's critics: 'You were never in Chicago.' To make ugliness even uglier, when Liebling collected his Chicago series into a book, he included this criticism — then dismissed it with glib bemusement, the sort that suggested he thought of Chicago with all of the seriousness of royalty visiting, well … Buffalo. And yet, at least psychologically, 'The Second City' would become one of the most influential things written about Chicago since Daniel Burnham's 'Plan of Chicago.'Seventy-five years after he left, we should just accept: Liebling was right. The nickname, of course, was metaphor: Chicago seemed second to New York in all things, an also-ran of a city, closer to a 'large place,' or worse, a 'not-quite metropolis' that could only view itself in relation to New York City. Plus, Chicago was the second largest city in the country in 1952. (Though Liebling saw Los Angeles's rapid growth about to bounce Chicago to third place, it didn't happen until the 1990s.) When Liebling moved to Chicago, the city seemed to have abandoned Burnham's vision. It would not be the next Venice or Paris or New York City. It was at an ebb, if not decline. Yet another Chicago was just around the bend: The mayor was Martin Kennelly ('a bit player impersonating a benevolent banker'), but Richard J. Daley was up next. Businesses were leaving the city, and even the stockyards that graced poetry were struggling. The tallest building was still the Chicago Board of Trade. Though Liebling notes (rightly still) that many of the city's biggest boosters fled to the North Shore every night, the white flight that transformed the South Side was just percolating. The Eisenhower was under construction, the Skyway was years off, and even O'Hare was not yet open for commercial air travel. Liebling's vision of Chicago would be unrecognizable today. Gentrification and development had not yet taken hold, so he saw neighborhoods strictly by ethnicity alone, which defined how people voted; an Italian, he wrote, was only politically loyal to Italian ward captains. Also, Chicago had few restaurants worth visiting, only barbecue joints (for which he had grudging respect). The culture and life of the city was found in the Loop alone, clustered together. The opera was dark, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra too hard to hear over the loud whine that it wasn't Boston or New York. The city was so empty of literature he runs constantly into Nelson Algren at house parties: 'A diet of turkey, Virginia ham and cocktail shrimp apparently agreed with him.' Theater? Hang on. Liebling found the 'smart' local attitude to be: If you knew better, you avoided attending Chicago theater. To attend local theater was to admit that you didn't know real (New York) theater, or you were too poor to buy a plane ticket, or you were 'indifferent to nuance and might, therefore, just as well go back to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where you went to high school.' Double . Some of this was accurate, and some of this was Liebling, who seemed to get as much wrong as he got right. He saw, for instance, no enthusiasm at all for the Cubs or the White Sox. Chicagoans were so boring, he suggested, because the temperature at the lake might be 20 degrees different from the suburbs and we couldn't even make small talk about our weather. We shared little. Today, we would call this lazy reporting or drive-by journalism. Thomas Dyja, in his definitive 2013 cultural history, 'The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream' (partly a chronicle of the mid-century period when Liebling lived in Chicago), called Liebling's series 'deeply incurious, if not dishonest.' And still, as even Liebling's critics have come to decide, he 'got many things right.' In fact, one of the depressing things about revisiting Liebling's series is how little has changed, despite the city being a more vibrant place full of Chicago flag tattoos and T-shirts. Liebling would have seen that as a part of the civic boosterism he loathed while living here, a characteristic he read as a symptom of chronic low self-esteem, and not merely local pride in your home. You can see now why Chicagoans wrote those confused letters: That said, that these questions remain in the water, picked over and picked over, as much a part of Chicago's character as hot dogs — no, Liebling wasn't totally wrong, though he was harsh. Liebling saw Chicago's ambivalence and suspiciousness towards homegrown talent (before they become stars) as 'a sign not of maturity but of a premature old age.' As an East Coaster myself, I never totally understood why Chicagoans claim certain locals as their own and ignore others: Bill Murray can do no wrong, yet Kanye (even before his impossible-to-defend behavior took hold) was a civic eye-roll. Murray showed his roots casually while Kanye was apocalyptically boastful. Liebling took this characteristic, the public shows of modesty (and less public tribalism), as good old fashioned Midwestern provincialism. Alex Kotlowitz, in his own Chicago book, 'Never a City So Real,' also reckons with Liebling, as any writer on Chicago must, and decides Liebling mistook the insular nature of certain neighborhoods as a citywide provincialism — which then manifested into a civic disappointment with itself. Kotlowitz, who has lived here for decades, describes the city with vastly more shading, as a place 'grappling with its promise, alternately cocky and unsure.' That sounds more like 2025. Then again, so do Liebling's portraits of aldermen who block the construction of new housing, presumably afraid to soil their own rock-solid constituencies. Paddy Bauler, who served the 43rd Ward for 30 years, and was never anyone's vision of transparency in local government, told Liebling that he had to do favors for everyone in his ward, whether or not they asked, because some people are too 'stupid' to know they need a favor. Bauler's motto was 'Everybody gets something,' insuring Bauler got something himself at election time. The problem, Bauler complained, was the Republicans in his ward (Lincoln Park, Old Town, Gold Coast) 'expected more than than their fair share.' It's those clear-as-day contradictions — modesty suspicious of ambition, corruption outraged by grabbiness — that Liebling seemed to find confusing, and one reason we should cut Liebling (who died in 1963) some slack. Besides, when he came to Chicago, he was pretty tense. He left the New Yorker that spring to write for Colliers, including a profile of Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune publisher. He found this newspaper, to put it mildly, a bit much: 'The Tribune reader issues from his door walking on the balls of his feet, muscles tense, expecting attacks by sex-mad footpads (thieves) at the next street corner, forewarned against the smooth talk of strangers with a British accent and prepared to dive behind the first convenient barrier as the sound of a guided-missile approaches — any minute now — from the direction of northern Siberia.' Weeks before he moved here, he also finalized a divorce, then got remarried to his mistress. Then, just as he arrived, his Colliers deal fell apart (they said his work was too critical). He began his time in Chicago unemployed, and yet, as he wrote friends back home in New York, his new wife became so enamored of the stores in the Gold Coast that shopkeepers raised their prices when they saw her coming. By the end of the year, the New Yorker welcomed him back to its pages, but what he was writing about Chicago, according to biographer Raymond Sokolov, became 'the fullest record of Liebling's state of mind,' his discontent with his Midwest lifestyle 'pouring out in one vindictive spurt.' About a decade later, before he died at 59 of pneumonia, Liebling saw himself as something of a literary failure, far from the best-seller lists; the collected 'Second City' alone, the book version, sold only 3,500 copies and was already out of print by 1960. But as a piece of writing, it's still joyously rangy, hilariously mean. ('A masterpiece of modulated contempt,' Steinberg wrote.) It was also an early example of what Sokolov called a new 'mature Liebling style.' The journalist, who had covered World War II and boxing and restaurants with a sharp, if sniffy, upper-crust New Yorker tone, finally found a voice in Chicago that was not fussy, 'shifting nonchalantly from Augustan to breezy.' Perhaps 'Second City,' in its own way, was about embracing the freedom in inconsistency. Late in life, Liebling continued to puzzle over the response to 'Second City,' writing once it 'survives as an ectoplasmic itch' in Chicago, though him always intended the series as a 'soothing ointment — but (Chicagoans) are hard to soothe.' Not sure I buy that, but more than one letter writer did wonder, generously, if the series should be read as tough love, pushing Chicago to consider its potential and improve. Certainly Liebling knew the city's literary traditions were already celebrating Chicago's contradictions: Carl Sandburg famously found the bluntness of the city's working class as a point of pride, and Algren, the same year that Liebling was in Chicago, published 'Chicago: City on the Make,' a lyrical ode that compares loving Chicago to 'loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.' (Kotlowitz took the title of his own book from Algren's embrace of dissonance.) There's plenty of 'The Second City' that hasn't aged a wink. Liebling meets local corporate leaders involved in an America First movement who show unbounded hubris. ('All things, national and international, were manifest to the manufacturers of overalls and breakfast cereals.') There's the perverse pride in a history of gang violence, and the reputation of University of Chicago undergraduates. ('The greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children's Crusade.') He finds the rumor about a suffocating Midwest friendliness throughout Chicago quickly extinguished by airport employees. But some itches evolve. He finds Chicago's infamous weakness for superlatives — 'greatest newspaper in the world,' 'the most beautiful buildings' — part of an ingrained 'all-or-nothing psychology.' He would have had a field day with politicians and civic leaders who still boast of Chicago as a 'world-class city,' somehow deaf to how that would sound to actual world-class cities. But reading 'The Second City' again, I wondered how Liebling would have seen the amateur satirists and social media influencers on TikTok who show off the city without a drip of self-loathing, who juxtapose political talk of Chicago as a 'hell hole' with footage of pastoral lakefront strolls, who never once seem to want to be anywhere else. He might have read them as yet another case of all-or-nothing overcompensating. Or he might have seen a new day. Certainly, if A.J. Liebling was around today, social media wouldn't have cared much. He would have been mocked, and he would have cycled in and out of feeds in 24 hours. Besides, who asked him anyway?
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Thurber House, a Columbus nonprofit for writers, is in dire need of financial support
Who was James Thurber? To faithful readers of The New Yorker magazine, the humorist was a comic icon noted for his astringent take on middle American life in the last century. His classic short stories include 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' and his comic doodles, frequently focused on canines, are numerous. Born in Columbus in 1894, Thurber often let his mind drift to his hometown for artistic inspiration. He died in 1961. For the last 40 years, no organization has done more to further Thurber's local legacy than Thurber House, the literary center that, since 1984, has operated at 77 Jefferson Ave. on the Near East Side. The house, which was occupied by the Thurber family from 1913 through 1917, is decorated in a manner that approximates its condition a century ago, and it hosts author talks and writing workshops. Since 1997, Thurber House has administered the Thurber Prize for American Humor, whose recipients include Christopher Buckley, David Sedaris and Trevor Noah. Yet, many in the younger generations aren't familiar with, or can't connect with, the organization's namesake, says Thurber House Executive Director Laurie Lathan.'If you say the name Kurt Vonnegut, a lot of them know the name,' says Lathan, contrasting Thurber House with the similar Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis. 'It'll resonate. But when you say James Thurber, not so much.' That lack of name recognition is given as one of the reasons for Thurber House's recent financial struggles. In 2020, to ensure viability amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the center initiated an emergency fundraising drive and accepted a CARES Act-funded award from the Ohio Arts Council. Now the center has launched an equally urgent plea for $200,000. 'Thurber House is struggling to remain open and fulfill our mission,' reads the text accompanying the appeal, which, as of press time in late January, had generated about half of its goal. Thurber House has already reduced its staff from six to four, laying off a full-time marketing and development director and an education coordinator. 'Thurber House has never had any fat in its budget,' says Lathan. The organization's budget for its most recent fiscal year, ending June 30, was about $760,000. Among the biggest challenges are increases in operating expenses that outpace growth in revenue and giving, she says. 'If our light bills continue to increase, and now our health insurance, how are we making up that difference in money?' Lathan says. 'It's a long-term issue that I, as an arts leader, look at. How are arts organizations and nonprofits in general going to continue to retain quality employees if they can't afford to hire someone?' Lathan says Thurber House, which does not have an endowment, has been underfunded. She says corporate giving lags because the center falls between two priorities. 'Some companies … have pools of funds for fine arts and performing arts,' Lathan says. 'They don't know where to put Thurber House because we're not a dance company [or] a theater company, and then we're not an art museum. So we aren't qualified for some of that funding because of that.' Other problems include the emergence of bookstores and libraries hosting the sort of revenue-generating author events that used to be the near-exclusive domain of Thurber House. Plus, despite the money raised during COVID, the pandemic put a seemingly permanent dent in attendance at many events. 'We've lost some of our older patrons,' Lathan says. 'Since COVID, they've either not come back or they've actually passed away.' This 'perfect storm,' as Lathan puts it, necessitated the present fundraising campaign, which was launched in lieu of Thurber House's annual holiday appeal. 'We just determined this is how much money that we need to get us through to the end of the year, and to land the year in the black,' she says. Major projects that would necessitate a capital campaign, such as making improvements to the house 40 years after its renovation, are not being considered until the center's financial situation improves. 'We can't even get to that point because we need to keep the lights on, we need to keep programs going,' she says. One Thurber House program that has demonstrated resiliency is its kids' summer writing camp, which has returned to an approximation of pre-pandemic levels. To build on that success, the organization has been 'edging up' fees for educational programs, Lathan says, and plans to start offering off-site 'satellite' camps throughout Central search of other revenue streams, the organization plans to start selling publishers and libraries seals to be affixed to the covers of books whose authors have won or been named finalists of the Thurber Prize. Michael Rosen, Thurber House's founding literary director who was with the organization from 1983 to 2001, laments what he views as the organization's fall from its past heights. He bemoans a lack of partnerships with other arts groups—the sort of collaborations that resulted in a Thurber-inspired musical composition by the nonprofit and the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra in 1994—as well as the emphasis on bringing in authors simply because they are touring. 'We defined the Thurber House readings as literature,' Rosen says of the approach to author events iwn his day. Rosen, also the editor or author of books on Thurber, admits the humorist's star is not what it once was. 'At the beginning of the Thurber House, there were many people who grew up on Thurber, who knew Thurber, people even who knew him personally here in town,' Rosen says. Even so, he sees celebrating Thurber as a foundational mandate of Thurber House. 'To anthologize [Thurber's] short pieces, or to keep them alive in the current curriculum, is difficult, which is partly the reason why the house had a mission: Hey, it's our job to call attention to this native son,' he says. For her part, Lathan says Thurber will remain at the heart of its mission, but by necessity, it has to broaden its programming. 'How do we get people engaged at Thurber House,' she says, 'if they don't know who James Thurber is? This story appeared in the March 2025 issue of Columbus Monthly. Subscribe here. This article originally appeared on Columbus Monthly: Thurber House financial struggles: Why the literary nonprofit is struggling
