With “Plan B” and “Language Lessons,” the actress is finally getting to start a career behind the camera, a goal one talent agency couldn’t understand.
Mustafa, a Folk Hero for a Weary Generation
The 24-year-old Canadian musician memorializes friends lost to violence on his debut EP, “When Smoke Rises.”
“When Smoke Rises” is a suite of folk songs about life and death in the musician Mustafa’s hometown of Toronto.Credit.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times
May 28, 2021, 12:40 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES In the middle of Mustafa’s potent, chilling and heart-rending debut EP, “When Smoke Rises,” is “The Hearse,” a startling two-minute meditation on revenge in the wake of a friend’s murder.
“I was all about the peace/I didn’t wanna risk it all/Oh, I know what’s at stake,” he sings, trying to maintain equanimity in the face of trauma. But his mood, and the song a soft folk number with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and an almost unconscious, corporeal rhythm takes a somber, unexpected turn: “But you made yourself special/I wanna throw my life away/For you.”
Lionel Shriver Warns Readers Not to Meet Their Favorite Authors
Credit.Rebecca Clarke
May 27, 2021
“The warts-and-all version is almost always a disappointment, and they risk a retroactive taint,” says the novelist, whose forthcoming book is “Should We Stay or Should We Go.”
What books are on your night stand?
Two books to prime for my next novel: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” and Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” One exercise in reverse research writing the novel first and then doing the homework: Katie Engelhart’s “The Inevitable,” about end-of-life suicide. Finally, mercifully, fiction: Ewan Morrison’s “How to Survive Everything,” which sounds like an antidote to the Engelhart.