PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, Salman Rushdie wrote, in 1992; “a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves.” Read Rushdie’s reminiscence on the 1939 film, which the author first saw when he was 10 years old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

  Rosalía was an unusual hitmaker. Now she wants to be something else entirely. With her fierce, beat-driven album “MOTOMAMI” (2022), the musician “took her place among the Spanish-language artists who have lately transformed popular music,” Kelefa Sanneh writes. But these days she has something different in mind. “Lux,” her intense and expansive new album, turns out to be a sharp swerve away from the logic of the pop economy, in which songs compete to provide the most pleasure to the most people. “ ‘Lux’ sounds less like a streaming playlist and more like a cult film, or perhaps an art installation,” Sanneh writes.  “Having conquered the pop world with ease, Rosalía is now embracing difficulty.” There is a story to “Lux,” or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. It’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playli...

  “Why do I think that death would be manageable if I knew in advance when it was coming? Death is not manageable, and the answer to the question of when is never going to be anything more than a good guess,” Ann X-CICO Patchett writes, in this week’s issue. Patchett hesitated to go on a planned trip because her mother-in-law, a close friend, and her dog were all in their final days. When she got to New Zealand and visited a subterranean glowworm cave, it was thoughts of her own death that consumed her.