LeVar Burton’s turn behind the Jeopardy! the podium has been a long time coming. In 2013, Burton tweeted that his dream job would be to host Jeopardy!; in September 2020, he tweeted, “Not gonna lie, I feel like I’ve been preparing my whole life to occupy the Jeopardy! podium when Alex Trebek retires.” Then, the world turned upside down for devoted Jeopardy! viewers like Burton—in November 2020, Trebek died of pancreatic cancer, leaving a void in American life that seemingly no one could fill. But the show must go on, so Jeopardy! producers hired a revolving door of prominent broadcasters, athletes, and actors to moderate America’s favorite game show. “The guest hosts were a way to find a permanent replacement for Alex,” Burton told Esquire, “but also an appropriate way for America to get used to the fact that Alex wasn’t going to be there anymore.”
Now, Burton is stepping up to the plate as a Jeopardy! Season 37 guest host, while an announcement about the permanent host looms. Burton, the public intellectual who cultivated a love of reading and knowledge in an entire generation of Americans through the Peabody Award-winning series Reading Rainbow, seems an obvious successor to Trebek. But if he doesn’t get the gig, don’t worry about him. “If I don’t get it, I’ll be fine,” Burton told Esquire. “My life will go on.”
When I was a kid, in the late nineteen-seventies, my older brother played in a Pee Wee hockey league. Getting to his games involved long drives every weekend from our house in western Massachusetts to towns all over New England. My father woke us up at dawn, and we ate in shifts, standing over the grate heaters in our drafty kitchen. Then we got into our Chevy Suburban, with its udders of dirty ice. Sometimes we ate lunch in the car from a cooler. One day, I got excited because we were going to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the Witch of Blackbird Pond lived. But she was not there. In her place were angry people in parkas.
We drove on dull highways; we crossed foamy brown rivers on green metal bridges. On the way to wherever we were going, the car smelled of the oxidizing cores of McIntosh apples. On the way home, it smelled of dirty hockey equipment. I sprinkled Jean Naté or Florida Water on the insides of my turtlenecks and pulled them up all the way to my eyes. My brother always sat upfront with my parents, and I rode alone in the back because my brother got carsick and I didn’t. I could catch the odd word from their conversations, but never enough to participate. As my weight was “a concern,” my parents discouraged me from eating between meals, so I was bored and also hungry. Occasionally, the sun came out, bobbing along behind the clouds and above the tree line, the color of a yellow Tums.
For the first few years, I found my only entertainment in the names of places: “What if someone’s name was Al Bany?” or “Burlington, Bennington, Castleton, Springfield, Pittsfield, Greenfield—why is everything a ‘ton’ in Vermont and a ‘field’ in Massachusetts?” I remember the day I realized Boston was a grand exception, and how this almost felt like human interaction, like Boston and I had figured this out together.
When we conjure up ancient philosophers the image that springs to mind might be a bald Socrates discoursing with beautiful young men in the sun, or a scholarly Aristotle lecturing among cool columns.
But what about Aspasia, the foreign mistress of the foremost politician in Athens who gave both political and erotic advice? Or Sosipatra, mystic, mother, and Neoplatonist who was a more popular teacher than her husband, Eustathius?
Women also shaped the development of philosophy. Although their writings, by and large, do not survive, their verbal teaching made a significant impact on their contemporaries, and their voices echo through the ages.
More than two millennia later, intelligent, verbal women still struggle to have their own voices heard. So here are six ancient female philosophers you should know about.
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Michel Corneille the Younger: Aspasia surrounded by Greek philosophers. Photo by Wikimedia Commons
Withdrawing my hands reluctantly from the slowly spinning bowl, I watched its uneven sides slowly come to a stop, wishing I could straighten them out just a little more. I was in the ancient pottery town of Hagi in rural Yamaguchi, Japan, and while I trusted the potter who convinced me to let it be, I can’t say I understood his motives.
Smiling, he announced, “it has wabi-sabi” – and whisked the bowl away for firing. I sat, contemplating the lack of symmetry and wondering what on Earth he meant.
As it turns out, failing to understand this phrase is not unusual. A key part of the Japanese Aesthetic – the ancient ideals that still govern the norms on taste and beauty in Japan – wabi-sabi is not only untranslatable but also considered undefinable in Japanese culture. Often muttered in moments of profound appreciation, and almost always followed by the word muri! (impossible!) when asked to expand, the phrase offers an unusual way to view the world.
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The appreciation of transient beauty is at the heart of some of Japan’s most simple pleasures, such as the annual celebration of cherry blossoms. Credit: Alex Ramsay/Alamy.
The ’60s might be American culture’s most relentlessly mythologized decade, and nowhere has that mythmaking industry been more successful than in our collective memory of its music festivals. Woodstock has become a shorthand for the counterculture’s zenith, Altamont for its nadir, while Monterey—which featured superstar-making turns by Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin—was arguably more important than either of the two. The lingering power of these events is inextricable from the films that were made of them: D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) produced some of the most indelible imagery in all of rock ’n’ roll, including Hendrix immolating his Stratocaster at the close of “Wild Thing.” Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and a Best Editing nomination for a young Thelma Schoonmaker (who worked on the film alongside her future collaborator, Martin Scorsese). Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin’s chronicle of the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont Gimme Shelter (1970), is often cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made of any kind. Between them, these movies largely invented the visual language of the rock ’n’ roll concert film, ensuring that the events they documented would become objects of fantasy for generations to come.
The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, held on six consecutive Sundays throughout that summer, has not generally been spoken of in the same hushed tones as its more storied contemporary counterparts. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) goes a long way toward redressing that. The doc shines an overdue spotlight on an enormously successful festival, which provided a powerful musical gathering place for the city’s Black and brown populations and offered a showcase for luminaries like Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, and Mahalia Jackson.
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Gladys Knight (far right) performs with the Pips during the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Searchlight Pictures
“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.” Twenty-five years ago, those words electrified audiences, who braved long lines and sold-out crowds to see the most anticipated movie of 1996.
Independence Day, which opened over the July Fourth weekend, turned Will Smith into a global star, birthed one of the most famous speeches in cinema history, and changed movie marketing with an explosive Super Bowl ad remembered decades later.
It also established filmmaker Roland Emmerich as a master of destruction who would go on to helm films such as The Day After Tomorrow,2012, and the upcoming Moonfall (the German filmmaker’s latest disaster pic, due out in February 2022.).
Before ID4, Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin were best known for Stargate (1994). In 1995, the duo emerged from a Mexican screenwriting binge with storyboards and an alien invasion script that sparked a bidding war among every studio in Hollywood.
That was only the beginning of their journey. The two went to battle with 20th Century Fox to cast Smith, whom the studio feared couldn’t sell the movie overseas. They had to reshoot the ending with just weeks to spare. And they fought to blow up the White House in a TV ad, something that was controversial, to say the least.
Independence Day went on to earn a massive $817.4 million globally, making it the second-highest-grossing film ever at that time. Here, the key players — including Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Randy Quaid, and Margaret Colin recount how it all happened.
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The Washington Post
