Arts & Life

Ally Love's regular Sunday classes, "Sundays with Love," have made the beloved spinning teacher a pandemic celebrity. We've invited Love to play a game called "Peloton? Meet Skele-ton." Three questions about bones.

Click the audio link above to find out how she does.

I'd like to salute the great comedy writer Anne Beatts with some her own words. Anne died this week at the age of 74. But many of her signature, boundary-breaking routines are tricky to quote on a Saturday morning radio show.

"I'm often accused of 'going too far,' " she once said. "Behind my desire to shock is an even stronger desire to evade the 'feminine stereotype.' You say women are afraid of mice? I'll show you! I'll eat the mouse!"

The Small Business Administration yesterday launched with great fanfare a long awaited portal that would allow arts venues closed down by pandemic to apply for grant money to cover rent, utilities, insurance and other accumulated expenses. The site went live at noon, but was wracked with so many technical issues that the SBA decided to shut the portal down indefinitely.

Before Nasim Pedrad impersonated Kim Kardashian and Ariana Huffington on Saturday Night Live, she impersonated Dora the Explorer at children's birthday parties. This was a low-budget operation, definitely not sanctioned by Nickelodeon. Pedrad had to assemble her own costume, complete with a backpack from Target. "Needless to say, parents were very disappointed when they opened the door and saw that they could've, like, asked a local cousin to do this same thing for free."

Earl Simmons, better known as the rapper DMX, died Friday at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, N.Y., according to a statement from his family. He had been on life support for the past few days following a heart attack. He was 50.

Unfocused and overstuffed, the first four episodes of HBO's The Nevers provided to critics lack a sufficiently strong narrative backbone to support the surfeit of characters, subplots, themes and familiar storytelling tics thrown at the viewer. The series pairs all this tumult with a frustratingly incremental approach to disclosing What Is Really Going On; as a result, allegiances shift, plots twist and characters take actions for reasons we can only guess at — provided we're willing to bother.

Youn Yuh-jung is an institution in Korean cinema. Her career spans five decades and includes starring roles in classic Korean films and famous TV dramas. Now, at 73, she has newfound fame in the U.S. for her role in the Oscar-nominated film Minari.

Youn is nominated for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first South Korean woman ever to be nominated for an Academy Award in an acting category.

"Crazy." "Moron." "Lunatic."

In his memoir On the House, Former Speaker John Boehner dishes on his past colleagues in Congress — with most of the harshest criticism directed at fellow Republicans. This becomes less surprising as he chronicles his slow burning disillusionment over the past decade with a GOP ultimately transformed and now defined by the ethos of former President Trump.

"I don't even think I could get elected in today's Republican Party anyway, just like I don't think Ronald Reagan could either," he concludes.

The long-awaited lifeline for live venues impacted by the coronavirus shut downs is finally here. Owners of small music venues, independent movie theaters and some museums can now apply for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant — a $16 billion grant program set up and run by the Small Business Administration.

Neither the pandemic nor age can keep legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp from her work. During the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Tharp, now 79, choreographed several dances through through Zoom. One was with four dancers — each of whom was in a different time zone.

Late in Patrick Radden Keefe's brutal, multigenerational treatment of the Sackler family, Empire of Pain, he offers a jarring anecdote.

It's 2019. The scandal surrounding OxyContin, Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers' role in America's devastating opioid epidemic is front-page news. Hundreds of people are dying every day from overdoses.

A dream of a day at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We'd come out of a huge David Hockney exhibition, and my family and I were pooped. So granddaughters, their mother Myndy and I sat on a rim of the Stravinsky Fountain to rest a bit, while my son Josh took our picture.

The fountain makes me smile four years later, as it did the first time I saw it decades ago. It's a 1983 collaboration between sculptors Jean Tinguely (he did the black mechanical parts) and Niki de Saint Phalle (the puffy colorful figures — something/someone in a crown, serpent, heart, lips).

Sanjena Sathian's debut novel, Gold Diggers, is full of voice. Neil — Neeraj when his parents are mad — Narayan's voice to be exact, telling the defining stories of his life from a hazy point in the future that is, at first, only hinted at. His rollicking, at times painful, and ultimately intensely satisfying tale begins when he's a teenager living in Hammond Creek, Ga. with his parents and older sister. He considers his existence to have been shaped by his parents' ambitions for him, but now that he's in high school, he's got a few ambitions of his own.

When the Rolling Stones released "Gimme Shelter" in 1969, everyone recognized Mick Jagger. But at the time, no one knew who that voice – you know the one – belonged to.

Lately, everyone's talking about trauma. Trauma in news form, trauma in essay form, trauma in Twitter thread form.

Growing up in East Jerusalem, Palestinian cookbook author Reem Kassis never expected to enter the food industry. For her, the kitchen represented a "life sentence" for women.

Instead, Kassis moved to the U.S. when she was 17, first studying business at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and then at the London School of Economics. It wasn't until she had a child that she began to see the kitchen as a "powerful place" where she could share important stories about food and culture with her daughter.

Imagine waking up with no memory. No memory of the night before, no memory of your family and friends, no memory of your own name, even.

Hangover-induced amnesia. You wake up — after a despairing battle with your psyche — pantsless and decaying in your battered hostel room, the window smashed, hot water flowing indefinitely out of the bathroom faucet.

Reading Helen Oyeyemi's Peaces is like walking into a bizarre interstitial space between a surrealist narrative populated by mongooses and strange characters and the realm of classic Agatha Christie-esque mysteries that take place on trains to undisclosed locations. If that doesn't make much sense, you're beginning to get an idea of what this novel is like.

Leigh Bardugo's new Rule of Wolves opens with a little vignette of terror: A winged monster attacking a rural farm. But readers of her Grishaverse books will know this isn't just any monster — it's the king himself, Nikolai of Ravka.