The Festival Beat

“The real key to success,” Amy Walters says, “doesn’t come from getting the right internship. It comes instead from knowing your own values and your own value. You don’t have to know what you want to do with the rest of your life today. But you need to know who you are and what matters to you.”

Finding the keys to happiness, says Dr. Laurie Santos, requires tapping into our primate brains, and observing the behavior and activities of those who report being very happy. And the results are often surprising, but also uplifting.
 

Roz Chast goes through the world with the eyes of a cartoonist, of a graphic storyteller who is constantly identifying and lampooning the ever anxious and self-conscious American middle class.

“Ward is one of those rare writers who’s traveled across America’s deepening class rift with her sense of truth intact.” – The Los Angeles Times

It was about to all come crashing down...

What do Cirque du Soleil, Reese Witherspoon, and Harry Potter have in common? Troupe Vertigo, of course!

Somethings are just Fate, like peanut butter and chocolate, dogs and tennis balls, and, well, the ensemble that was meant to become The Eroica Trio.

There are not many historians whose profile as a public intellectual is as prominent as Doris Kearns Goodwin. Surely not many historians have had a cameo on The Simpsons. And while she has a great sense of humor about the attention she gets, she is dead serious about what her research into presidential lives can tell us now. 

At a time when the media is awash in discussions of impeachment, emoluments and other complex constitutional issues, Jeffrey Rosen seems to be on every TV producer’s speed dial.

“For the first time in recorded history,” says Thomas Bollyky, “parasites, viruses, bacteria, and other infectious diseases are not the leading cause of death and disability in any region of the world.” But the news is not all good...

Robert Pinsky – arguably America’s greatest living poet – has dedicated his career to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.

In July 2017, after President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he picked up the phone in Air Force One and called David Sanger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times national security correspondent.