Richard Burton’s legacy is one of contradictions. He is both a towering figure of 20th-century popular culture and a bright, brief candle whose peers made indelible marks on the 21st, too. He managed to achieve success as both a classical stage actor and marquee-name movie star at a time when slippage between those worlds was at a minimum. He was nominated for an Oscar seven times, but never won. His relationship with Elizabeth Taylor—with whom he co-starred in many films and stage productions, most famously Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is remembered as an epic love story despite their twice divorcing. He described himself as a socialist, or indeed a communist, but moved to Switzerland to avoid paying taxes, wryly commenting, “I believe that everyone should pay them—except actors.” Famously an alcoholic, he claimed to drink to stave off the deadness of being offstage. Sometimes his alcoholism was functional; other times he was reportedly so drunk, like while filming The Klansman (1974), that he had to shoot all his scenes sitting or lying down. By his forties, he had become frail and weak. By 58, he was dead.
The genocide in Gaza has exposed the weaponization of the Holocaust as a vehicle not to prevent genocide, but to perpetuate it, not to examine the past, but to manipulate the present.
When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand […]
Daniel Bessner, Derek Davison
On American Prestige: The Gilded Age star has some things to say.
The post From the Gilded Age to American Decline, With Morgan Spector appeared first on The Nation.
What does it mean to serve the elite in a growing age of populism, and what are the consequences of high-quality journalism only being available to the 1%?
Five years since the start of the pandemic and the racial reckoning post-George Floyd, we’re still seeing the effects that 2020 had on culture and politics.