Nepenthe

A week in the life of Rowan Atkinson. On Christmas Day, he and his wife Sunetra slipped quietly into a school in Kennington, south London, to bring some cheer to 2,000 troubled children brought together by the charity Kids Company. The comedian's eyes welled up with tears, said one witness. That night, Atkinson was interviewed for a BBC1 documentary celebrating 25 years of the comedy classic Blackadder. Looking ill at ease in the role of Rowan Atkinson, he made the surprising disclosure that there was at least one episode of Blackadder Goes Forth he had never seen until he happened to find it on his in-flight entertainment. "I'm not a great laugher, sadly," he admitted, "but I might have sniggered at it, which was my way of saying that was very funny." And yesterday he was due on stage for two preview performances of the musical Oliver!, produced by Cameron Mackintosh at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It is testimony to his status as king of British comedy ...

Alex Gibney is one of the most important documentarists at work today. Two of his recent films - Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, about high-level corporate corruption in America, and Taxi to the Dark Side, an account of US military interrogation and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq - are essential viewing for anyone seeking an understanding of our times. His films are sober, carefully crafted and thoroughly researched, politically committed but not propagandistic, and deeply felt without focusing the camera on his own bleeding heart. He is thus considerably different from the subject of his latest film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, one of the creators and most extreme exponent of the "New Journalism" of the 1960s, and the man who gave us that overworked phrase "fear and loathing". Thompson, who had an obsession with guns, owning 22 of them (all kept fully loaded), committed suicide with a gunshot to his head ...

The anti-Cute Overload: Fuck You, Penguin an example: Thanks for "gracing" us with your presence I get it, Whale, you're busy. I've only been on this FUCKING BOAT for three and a half hours waiting for you, and the only thing I've seen so far is my lunch from earlier. It's not like you spend your entire goddamn life in the ocean, so I see why you would only come up for basically a split second. Personally, if someone was going to all this trouble specifically to see me , I would take time out of my BUSY ASS SCHEDULE to at least stop by the boat and make some small talk, maybe have some salmon. But I understand, Whale, places to go, 500 pounds of food to eat. I'll be fine. The real question here, Whale, is will you be fine? Can you really live with yourself? Maybe you need to make a change.

BookForum reviews Saramago's newly translated book: DIM REAPER Portuguese novelist José Saramago specializes in bold moves. In The Stone Raft (1986), the grand fabulist wrenched the Iberian Peninsula from its moorings; in Blindness (1995), he rendered an entire population sightless. A spry demiurge, indeed. Now well past eighty, with his Death with Interruptions —rendered in a pitch-perfect translation by Margaret Jull Costa—he challenges mortality itself while playfully subverting the timeworn theme of eternal life. On the first day of the New Year, in an unnamed land, death takes a holiday. Initially, this calls for celebration. Before long, however, the implications of life everlasting become evident, and the blessing begins to resemble a curse. People continue to age and deteriorate, their ends simply prolonged. Church authorities fret that the final resurrection is made meaningless, and therefore their doctrine is, too; undertakers are thrown out of work; hospitals and co...

Why movie vampires always break all the vampire rules The modern reworkings of the genre are traceable to a few different factors. For one thing, rewriting the rules is just good storytelling. Upending conventions lets you surprise the audience. You thought garlic was going to ward off the boss vampire? Sorry. You planned to kill him with that little piece of sharpened wood? Good luck. These days, you'll see vampires slapping crosses out of the way more often than shrinking in fear. Variations on the vampire rules also make for some clever plot twists. For example (spoiler alert!), in 30 Days of Night , Josh Hartnett notices that once bitten, victims become vampires right away—but they don't become evil vampires for a few hours. He therefore injects vampire blood into his veins so he can fight them off and save his wife. True Blood also has a smart twist on the myth-busting trope: The vampires started the myths themselves. "If the humans thought they couldn't see us ...

wowOwow is a free daily Internet website created, run and written by Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Liz Smith, Joni Evans, Mary Wells, Sheila Nevins, Joan Juliet Buck, Whoopi Goldberg, Julia Reed, Joan Ganz Cooney, Judith Martin, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, and Marlo Thomas. Many of us have known each other and been friends for a long time. Liz, for instance, met Candy in the 1960s when Candy was new to New York and an unknown actress. Candy and Lily worked together on “Murphy Brown” and found themselves in a mutal admiration society. Mary Wells and Joni Evans became instant old friends when Mary was writing her first book. Lesley and Peggy met at CBS News in 1982 the day Dan Rather called in sick. Peggy wrote a daily broadcast for him; Lesley found herself subbing for him; they pitched in and a long friendship began. So: we go back. And for years we have been talking to each other about everything under the sun – our families, our work, our worlds. No matter what was happ...

( this in Britain ) It was the first lifestyle drug, launched against fierce opposition from the moral right, which revolutionised social and sexual attitudes and helped define the 1960s. Now, almost 50 years on, it is to be made available over the counter without a prescription. Another milestone in the history of the contraceptive pill was signalled last week with the disclosure that, from the New Year, pilot schemes in two south-London primary care trusts, Southwark and Lambeth, will, for the first time, allow pharmacists and nurses to provide it to women over the age of 16. The aim is to test whether making the Pill more easily accessible reduces unwanted pregnancies. Pharmacies are open for longer hours than GP surgeries and do not require an appointment or have long waits. The Family Planning Association said that it received scores of calls from women who had run out of the Pill and didn't know where to go to rep...

Gretchen Mol as The Notorious Bettie Page , a Mary Harron film, courtesy of Cinematical :

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Says the TLS : Given the amount of time and effort that curators, collectors, dealers, scholars and critics spend on formulating acute judgements of taste in relation to oil paintings, it seems odd that so few are prepared to apply some of the same skills in exploring works of art (some of them distinguished) which stimulate another sense altogether: that of smell. Why is great perfume not taken more seriously? While many art professionals are very serious about many branches of literature, architecture and music, I have yet to find a curatorial colleague who regularly beats a path to the fragrance counter in search of, say, Joy Parfum, the 1930 masterpiece by Henri Alméras for Jean Patou, which, if it were a painting, could hang beside Matisse’s nearly contemporary “Yellow Odalisque” in Philadelphia. And yet, the parallels between what ought to be more properly regarded as sister arts are undeniable. Artists and colourmen combine natural and, these days, synthetic pigments with media ...

Tells us Jezebel : This morning on Today , "experts" weighed in on the hot button issue of chivalry, and whether the concept is dead, outdated, or just plain unfeminist. We don't think that chivalry is dead, and we don't think that women on the receiving end of it are less feminist, but we do think some of the rules of etiquette need to be revamped to reflect the shifts in gender roles. The misconception is that, deep down, all women want a bad boy. Untrue: We just don't want someone who kisses our asses or behaves like a doormat. But that doesn't mean that manners should be thrown out the window. We know it seems like we want it both ways: equality and courtesy. But why must the two be mutually exclusive? Besides, shouldn't there be a few trade offs, or benefits, for the crap we have to put up with as women? We've come up with an updated list of rules of the new chivalry for the modern man…and woma 1.) Give her your seat. Not because she...