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    Karen Durbin, 80, Dies; ‘Fearless’ Feminist Who Edited The Village Voice

    A fierce advocate of sexual liberation, she pushed the alternative weekly to cover women’s issues, as well as gay rights and avant-garde culture.Karen Durbin, a fierce feminist who championed sexual liberation and fulfillment as a journalist, served as the second female editor in chief of The Village Voice and then went on to become a virtuoso film critic for The New York Times and other publications, died on April 15 in Brooklyn. She was 80.Her death, in a health care facility, was caused by complications of dementia, her friend and former colleague Cynthia Carr said.Appointed in 1994 as The Voice’s editor in chief — she was only the second woman in that job in the paper’s history, and the first in nearly two decades — Ms. Durbin waged a fervent campaign to attract young readers. Part of that effort involved tilting toward often incendiary coverage of feminism, gay rights and avant-garde culture, and away from muckraking about corrupt and incompetent landlords, judges and politicians.Not that she abandoned covering corruption and crime: In 1996, she overruled the paper’s lawyers and published an article that all but accused the nightclub promoter Michael Alig of “A Murder in Clubhand,” as the headline proclaimed, after the reporter, Frank Owen, produced an on-the-record source. (Mr. Alig later pleaded guilty to manslaughter.)An assortment of Ms. Durbin’s press credentials. After her stint as editor in chief at The Village Voice, she wrote about film for The New York Times and other publications.Karen Durbin Papers, Barnard Archives and Special CollectionsBut even before she was editor in chief, she had set a tone that outraged traditionalists, mostly the older, white male staffers — or “the boys club,” as she put it. When she was the senior arts editor, they took issue with some of her editorial choices, including an assignment she made in 1986: Ms. Carr’s profile of the performance artist Karen Finley, whose act included the sexually explicit use of canned yams as part of a sendup of female objectification.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Becoming Katharine Graham’ Review: A Newspaper Leader, in Her Voice

    The sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a straightforward approach in this documentary about the Washington Post publisher, letting a pioneer shine.To tell the story of Katharine Graham, who led The Washington Post during a pivotal period for the paper and the nation, the sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a standard approach, interweaving archival material with talking-head interviews. The result is a conventional documentary, and by all means an admiring one. But her story is so compelling — wrenching, inspiring, precedent-setting — that the straightforward account, with its fluidly constructed chronology and Graham’s voice front and center, hits the mark.Graham took the helm of the Post in 1963, after the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham, the dynamic publisher who had been tapped for the role by her father. At the time, Katharine Graham was stepping out of the shadows and confronting the cultural taboo against female bosses. Still, it took her a year to summon the courage to ask a question at an editorial meeting.Soon she’d be presiding over the newspaper’s transition from a local publication to one of national impact as it went head-to-head with the Nixon administration — first when it joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, and then when it led the pack in reporting on the Watergate scandal. Excerpts from Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes — the gift to historians that keeps on giving — reveal, in conversations spewing misogynistic venom, how intent the president was on destroying Graham and her company.The directors also highlight The Washington Post’s 1975 labor dispute with its printing press operators, hewing closely to the management perspective; a more robust and balanced look would have deepened the documentary, or at least injected a welcome bit of friction into its celebratory mood.This is a strong portrait despite such lapses, in large part because it’s fueled by Graham’s voice, via the audiobook of her autobiography and an ample selection of interviews. (She died in 2001, at 84.) With her distinctive upper-crust inflection and striking candor, she quietly explores her unlikely reinvention from self-doubting wife and daughter to groundbreaking businesswoman. Through her eyes, “Becoming Katharine Graham” illuminates a charged moment in American history.Becoming Katharine GrahamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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    Extra Extra! The End Times, Onscreen

    Alien invasions, viruses, zombies, meteors, natural or human-caused catastrophes. When the end is nigh in apocalyptic, dystopian, disaster or horror films and television shows, there is often a distinct moment that offers audiences a glimpse of what was known in those last days before civilization was forever changed: the front pages of newspapers.Sometimes the camera lingers on the page, allowing us to read headlines that telegraph the scramble to make sense of unprecedented events. Other times, blink and you’ll miss it.In some instances, these front pages are the last ones printed in the before-times; in others, humanity endures in the end, though it is certainly transformed.The pivotal disaster might have been long past. Or perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end.‘Men in Black’ (1997)Alien threats endanger Earth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lynda Obst, Producer, Dies at 74; Championed Women in Hollywood

    She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Garfield’s Journey From Comic Strip to Weird Internet Incubator

    He hates Mondays, he’s No. 1 at the box office and he’s been the subject of a lot of weirdness over the last 40-plus years.You may have noticed that “The Garfield Movie” was the No. 1 movie in America last week, earning $14 million and taking over the top spot from the infinitely more hyped “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” It has grossed $55 million in North America and $156 million globally in two weeks.“The Garfield Movie” found the top of the box office in its second week of release.Dneg Animation/Sony Pictures, via Associated PressAfter more than 45 years of daily strips (that still get made every day), three feature films, 76 books, three animated series, dozens of video games and a literal boatload of merchandise, we may ask, how did we get here?In an attempt to answer that question, we took a trip down the Garfield rabbit hole.So Much MerchandiseThe first thing you come across is the merchandise. There are T-shirts, phones, watches, furniture, clocks, slippers, tents, wallets, trading cards, eye shadow and roller skates with Garfield’s leering image.There was even a Garfield toilet seat cover. “It turned out to be a great product. It was real colorful,” Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, told The New York Times in 2019. (There are, in fact, numerous Garfield toilet seat covers.)This is no accident. Davis released the three-panel newspaper comic strip in 1978 with an eye toward selling his creation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How a Culture Editor Covers the Kids’ Entertainment Beat

    Laurel Graeber, who has covered kids’ entertainment at The Times for nearly three decades, shared her favorite stories and interviews from the beat.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Laurel Graeber grew up loving the theater and museums. But she never thought she would write about them for The New York Times — or that she would do so for nearly three decades.“I was an editor, but I always wanted to write,” said Ms. Graeber, who helped lead the Culture desk’s copy department for more than 10 years before she retired from full-time work in 2017. “And when the freelance assignment of writing our weekend kids’ entertainment column became open, I said yes.”She has written regularly about culture for young people for nearly three decades, spotlighting the best activities that parents or caregivers can do with children each weekend in New York City. She also writes features on new television shows, movies, museum exhibitions and podcasts for kids.“What I find most enjoyable is stuff for adults that’s also good for kids, but not necessarily geared toward them,” Ms. Graeber said in a recent interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Tom Shales, TV Critic Both Respected and Feared, Dies at 79

    An incisively funny Washington Post columnist, he earned nicknames like Terrible Tom and had the clout to make or break shows.Tom Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post whose scalpel-sharp dissections of shows he deemed dead on arrival earned him nicknames like the Terror of the Tube, as well as a reputation for the power to make or break shows, died on Saturday in Alexandria, Va. He was 79.James Andrew Miller, a longtime collaborator and friend, said he died in a hospice facility from complications of Covid.Despite toiling in a political town far removed from the coastal capitals of the entertainment industry, Mr. Shales wielded enormous influence during his three-decade career, starting in 1977, as The Post’s chief television critic.Those whose fortunes were tied to the small screen considered him both a kingmaker and a high executioner in an era when network television’s hold on American culture was so tight as to be almost crushing.“He has been called brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and screamingly funny,” Time magazine observed in 1981, christening him “Terrible Tom, the TV Tiger.” “Also, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC president Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, ‘On the Air,’ syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in Manhattan’s network headquarters.”To celebrate Mr. Shales’s 25th anniversary at the newspaper, The Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, arranged a party at her house that was attended by the likes of Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Conan O’Brien. Ms. Graham explained the star-studded turnout in a single word, according to a report in Washingtonian magazine: “Fear.”No wonder. Delivering prose so colorful it seemed to be written in neon, he had the power to devastate.In a 1987 review of “The Morning Program,” CBS’s latest attempt to compete with the “Today” show, he wrote that “some TV shows seem to call less for a review than an exorcism.”“Watching it was like waking up and finding the house overrun with last night’s party guests,” he continued, “most of them stewed to the gills and gabby as all get-out.”In a 2005 column about ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” he wrote that it seemed like little more than an assemblage of “scenes from medical shows of the past already restaged ad infinitum and ad nauseam,” and that it was “a ‘new’ show only in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was a new man.”After he teed off in 2003 on the Fox teenage drama “The O.C.” as a “moody, moon-faced trifle,” the show fired back with a hospital scene featuring a patient named Tom Shales, who is incontinent. “I consider it an honor,” Mr. Shales said in an interview with the Page Six gossip section of The New York Post. “It’s a TV critic’s only shot at immortality.”He was a magnet for furious phone calls from sitcom stars and network titans. “So-and-so would call, and he’d tell me, ‘Get on the other line, this is going to be good,’” Mr. Miller, who worked on the television team at the Post with Mr. Shales in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “This person literally would be just cursing him out for 20 minutes, and he’d be sitting there trimming his fingernails. If you hooked him up to an EKG, there would be no movement whatsoever.”While Mr. Shales’s reviews could be acidic, his indignant salvos came from a place of passion. In a 1989 interview with the public radio host Terry Gross, he recalled his thoughts as a child when his family finally got a 14-inch RCA set in a mahogany console: “This was a miracle, this was the Second Coming and nirvana all rolled into one.”At 13, he wrote a school paper outlining the steps he planned to take to become a television columnist when he grew up. “He formed this bond with the medium so early,” Mr. Miller said. “It was the love of his life.”When Mr. Shales would do one of his brilliant takedowns, Mr. Miller said, “he wasn’t trying to destroy the show or the writers.”“He was just angry because he knew it could be better. He had no patience for people who were phoning it in or reaching for the lowest common denominator.”The shows he loved, he loved. In 1990, he called “Twin Peaks,” the director David Lynch’s eerie and unsettling small-town drama, “a captivating blend of the existential and the pulpy, the surreal and the neo-real, the grim and the farcical.” “Twin Peaks,” he added, “is new age music for the eyes.”In a 2006 column, he wrote that David Simon’s gritty HBO crime drama “The Wire” “might be the most authentic epic ever seen on television.” “You go to ‘The Wire’ not to escape,” he added, “but to be immersed in a world where madness and sanity can seem interchangeable.”As Mr. Shales told Time: “People who respect TV are the ones I respect. It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”Thomas William Shales was born on Nov. 3, 1944, in Elgin, Ill., one of three children of Clyde Shales, who ran a towing service and body shop, and Hulda (Reko) Shales, who managed a clothing store.He served as co-editor of his high school newspaper and went on to become the editor in chief of the campus newspaper at American University in Washington, where he graduated with a degree in journalism in 1968.His first full-time job in journalism was at The D.C. Examiner, a free tabloid, where his verbal gymnastics caught the attention of editors at The Post, who hired him in 1972 as a general-assignment reporter. Focusing his sights on television and popular culture, he became the chief TV critic five years later.In addition to his Post columns, Mr. Shales published a number of books, including an oral history of “Saturday Night Live,” written with James Andrew Miller. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1988.The job landed him in the middle of swirling controversies about the toxic state of television, with its blood-soaked detective dramas, sensationalized news shows and sex-addled sitcoms — which, in the view of many pundits, were a source of cultural rot.Mr. Shales was all too happy to wade in up to his thighs. In response to a spate of leering television movies at the dawn of the 1980s involving torture, child molestation and teenage prostitution, he wrote that “watching prime-time TV is like being trapped in Sleaze City’s tackiest honky-tonk.”“One gets a warped and depressing view,” he added, “of what it means to be alive.”His sharp-eyed takes won him a Pulitzer for criticism in 1988.While his Post column never waned in influence, Mr. Shales, who was making more than $300,000 a year thanks to his Post salary and his syndication revenues, took a buyout from The Post in 2006 after a management transition. He continued to contribute columns under contract until 2010.In addition to his Post columns, he published a number of books, including two oral histories with Mr. Miller: “Live From New York,” a history of Saturday Night Live” (2002), and “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” about ESPN” (2011).Mr. Shales, who never married or had children, leaves no immediate survivors.Having spent years in his Washington Post office with three televisions flickering nonstop, and with another three televisions glowing at his home in McLean, Va., Mr. Shales told Time that sometimes even he tuned out on the programming at hand. “After all,” he said, “only about 2 percent of what’s on is worth really watching.” More