Doug McGrath and Richard Brody contributed hot-topic essays over the past month at The New Yorker (edited by David Remnick '81, keeping the Tiger spirit alive there).
McGrath got the party started in the January 18 issue with a piece titled "We Have a Serious Problem," in the Shouts & Murmurs section. McGrath provides a fanciful diary of key dates in imagined discussions between Donald Trump and a key aide in his presidential bid. One except:
JANUARY 12, 2016: Trump slumped in his chair. He’d been holding the last slice of an extra-large everything pizza for an unheard-of five whole minutes without eating it. Jeff’s applications to work for calmer, nicer men—Rahm Emanuel, Robert Durst, the new social-media guy at ISIS—had so far not come through. He hardly slept anymore, and even though he was only thirty, his hands shook as if he’d just survived a plane crash.
In the February 3 issue, Brody gives a highly positive review to "Hail, Caesar!" the new comedy by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen '79. Brody found a lot to like in the film, noting:
“Hail, Caesar!” is a comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz. Hollywood has been ripe for lampooning from the start, but, for all the movie’s incisive humor, the Coens don’t so much mock the movie colony as look on with an unusually benign astonishment at the contrast—only superficially a contradiction—between the absurd wonders of the movies that were made at the time and the even more absurd stories of their making.Brody's other articles so far this year looked at the 2016 Oscar nominations and the Star Wars saga.
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