She’s Smashing In Her New Role by Alex Soloski
As a devotee of the Clone Club, I’m happy as can be to have Tatiana Maslany making weekly appearances on my television again. As the Marvel machine mandates, Maslany’s been making the rounds to promote her entry into their vast cinematic universe, and she’s proven to be engaging at every turn, even before factoring in her determination to use these prominent platforms to advocate human rights positions that her employer has sometimes been overly reticent to do (see the above photo for an especially great example). Alex Soloski profiles Maslany for The New York Times, and it’s a real delight.
The Mets Are Great. They’re Also Great TV. by Joe DeLessio
As has happened from time to time during my decades of fandom, my interest in baseball is at a low ebb right now, largely caused by a combination of lingering ire over the way ownership handled the most recent off-season labor dispute and the increasing eagerness of the sport’s powers that be to cater to online betting. (Simultaneously, I’m devouring The Baseball 100, the massive tome by Joe Posnanski, so I’m clearly not fed up with baseball, simply baseball as it’s managed and marketed right now.) This article by Joe DeLessio almost makes me rethink my current hiatus from viewing, except that enjoying the wildly creative broadcasts described in the piece would require committing to Mets games, a foul line that I simply cannot cross. I’ll just occasionally watch the clips of Edwin Diaz coming in from the bullpen linked in the article. That will be enough to give me a little dose of giddy joy. This article is published by New York.
Candy-Colored Guides to Literary Adventure by Anna Grace Lee
In recent months, turning the page of The New York Times to discover an article focusing on my home state has generally brought dismay: flagrant misuse of government funds for a fantasy novel presented as an election report, crackpot Republicans in a breathless race to see who can be most toxically irresponsible, and a state Supreme Court willing to flout common sense and the actual law to do the bidding of the norm-shredding right wing. So it is with great pleasure that I note that this week several column inches in the Paper of Record were devoted to the absolutely fabulous (in every way) independent bookstore A Room of One’s Own and the boundless creativity of their social media and marketing manager, Fawzy Taylor. Anna Grace Lee does the reporting.
Coffee for Two 