All posts tagged: Cynical

The Guide #236: Is celebrity casting a cynical marketing stunt or does it help to democratise theatre? | Culture

The Guide #236: Is celebrity casting a cynical marketing stunt or does it help to democratise theatre? | Culture

Published by Sam Flores

Timothée Chalamet might have smirked his way out of an Oscar. Sabrina Carpenter might have been roundly snubbed at the Grammys. But there’s one place both would be welcomed with open arms: the UK theatre scene. It seems we can’t get enough of celebs on stage (acting chops preferable but not mandatory). This week alone, London’s West End features Stranger Things star Sadie Sink, singer Self Esteem and Strictly cutie pie Johannes Radebe. Meanwhile, Mischa Barton, best known for playing Marissa Cooper in the 00s TV series The OC, is touring the UK and Ireland in a new adaptation of James M. Cain’s crime novel Double Indemnity. Celebrity casting or stunt casting as it’s sometimes less kindly known, isn’t new: the Donmar Warehouse was at it back in 1998, casting Nicole Kidman in erotic two-hander The Blue Room, to quite the commotion. But in recent years it’s become increasingly common and, to many, increasingly cynical. There are shows with a rotating roster of leads for every taste: last year’s Every Brilliant Thing offered Lenny Henry …

The Cynical, Gullible American Man

The Cynical, Gullible American Man

Published by Daniella Wilson

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy. The coronavirus wasn’t the only epidemic to hit the United States in the past decade. Americans are also facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices. Reliable information is both more available and harder to find than ever—and those who spread misinformation have been rewarded with positions …

Do Not Be Cynical About Jesse Jackson

Do Not Be Cynical About Jesse Jackson

Published by José Betancourt

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, many businesses proudly kept in their windows signs from Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and ’88 presidential runs. He was a revered figure, someone people in D.C. were deeply thankful for. “Nothing will ever again be what it was before,” the writer James Baldwin said after Jackson’s ’84 Democratic National Convention speech. “It changes the way the boy on the street and the boy on Death Row and his mother and his father and his sweetheart and his sister think about themselves. It indicates that one is not entirely at the mercy of the assumptions of this Republic, of what they have said you are, that this is not necessarily who and what you are. And no one will ever forget this moment, no matter what happens now.” Yet when you turned on the television, you saw another Jesse Jackson. This Jesse Jackson was a dangerous man, a radical, a demagogue, someone who thrived off fomenting racial division. To the people around me, Jackson—the reverend and …