In New Book, Journalist Alleges Russian Links To Mysterious Deaths Abroad

Journalist Heidi Blake on the Russian state’s development of tools for assassination

Putin has, in a very concerted way, poured [resources] into a number of laboratories in which government scientists just dedicate their lives to the development of weapons and poisons, which are designed to kill without leaving a trace. We know that the Russian state has a whole armory of poisons, which are designed to trigger, for example, fast acting cancers or to trigger cardiac arrest — or even psychotropic drugs, which are designed to destabilize enemy targets, to mood altering substances, which can create the appearance that the person has plunged into a very deep and profound depression.

One of the things our intelligence sources have talked to us about is the study of suicide clusters in which there is a suspicion that the Russian state may have either driven individuals to kill themselves or has so successfully destabilized them that when their deaths are made to look like suicides, there’s a pretext in which that can be made believable, because their behavior in the weeks leading up to their deaths has been so disordered.

Robert Pattinson Does Not Want To Play An English Prince, Thank You Very Much

British actor Robert Pattinson can’t tell you how many times people have said to him: “Hey man … you know what you’d be great at playing? An English prince.”

But that’s not really his thing.

“I think when you first start, if you’re tall and English and have kind of floppy hair, in England that is the box that you’re put in,” he says. “But I like movies because of Pacino, basically. I didn’t grow up watching period dramas and being like, ‘That’s what I want to do!’ ”

As a kid, Pattinson was drawn to movies featuring “antihero characters” — unafraid protagonists who “weren’t too influenced by everybody around them.”

Pattinson became a teen heartthrob playing vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films. Once that franchise ended, he sought out complex roles in independent, art-house movies. “Playing characters in a moral gray area is much more exciting and satisfying to do,” Pattinson says. “I’ve only really been able to find unusual parts in smaller movies.”

Pattinson’s latest film, The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers, is a two-character story set in the 1890s, in a lighthouse on a desolate rock off the coast of New England. Willem Dafoe plays the old lighthouse keeper, and Pattinson is his young apprentice. As the island is hit by a fierce storm, the two men begin to lose track of time — and their grip on reality.

“The character doesn’t know who he is, or where he is, or what’s going on, and it’s just infuriating him,” Pattinson says. “For performance stuff, these are the parts that you always look for. … You know that there’s no kind of upper limit in what you can do with them.”

Photo: Fadel Senna /AFP via Getty Images

I had specific experiences and I dealt with them with a therapist. It’s been ongoing, honestly. The whole thing brought up a lot of feelings for me, and it was a really emotional experience that I don’t feel resolved about, and I think I will probably talk about it, but right now I don’t have all the right words.

— Reese Witherspoon on the #MeToo movement and her own trauma

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Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde (2001)

‘From Book To Script To Screen,’ Reese Witherspoon Is Making Roles For Women

Witherspoon talks with Terry Gross for the first time – about #MeToo, her early roles, and starting a production company. 

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Nat King Cole recording at Capitol Recordig Studios in Los Angeles (1963)

Reissue Captures Nat King Cole Before He Broke Through To Mainstream

Early in his career, Cole formed a trio with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince. Hittin’ the Ramp, a new 7-CD roundup, showcases the band that help catapult Cole to stardom.

Years After Her Parents’ Murder-Suicide, Musician Allison Moorer Finds Healing

When Moorer was 14, her father shot and killed her mother and then took his own life. Moorer, a country singer-songwriter, has a new album and accompanying memoir (both entitled Blood) about the incident and her road to healing. Moorer brought her guitar to the interview.

I was an anxious kid, and I had all this agitation inside of me, and so it made sense that I just assumed I might burst into flames. It seemed entirely possible. And then as I got older and became a teenager and my anxiety kind of became more understandable, I kind of wanted to burst into flames, like that would burn out all the anxiety inside of me and I’d be kind of clean. So I just kind of wanted that. And so it just repeated in my head over and over again until I decided, ‘I’ve got to write about it.’

— Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here, about two children who combust into flames when they’re upset

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Kathryn Hahn for The Hollywood Reporter

Actor Kathryn Hahn Says The Best Part Of Her Career Came Post-Kids

When Kathryn Hahn first moved to LA to become an actor, she started auditioning — but quickly became disillusioned.

“When I started to see the roles that were available to me, what I was being seen for, I definitely thought … ‘This is just such a small part of me that’s being seen. I wish somebody could see more of what I can offer,’” Hahn says.

It wasn’t until Hahn was in her late 30s and 40s that she finally began landing the roles she craved, playing complex women in TV series like Transparent and Parks and Recreation, and movies like Bad Moms and Private Life. Hahn notes that most of these roles have been with female directors and producers.

“The most complicated and messy roles I’ve been able to get have been offered through women,” she says. “I’m just so buoyed and galvanized that the juiciest part of [my career] has been post-kids. … I never anticipated that. So that’s terribly exciting.”

Hahn is currently starring in the HBO series Mrs. Fletcher. The show, which is based Tom Perrotta’s bestselling novel, centers on a divorced woman who has a confusing sexual reawakening after her son leaves home for college.

“We were surrounded by an incredible group of women directors and writers and we had this amazing intimacy coordinator,” Hahn says of her work on Mrs. Fletcher. “That was what made it attractive to me. It was finding a woman in her complete privacy of finding pleasure for just herself.”

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Janis Joplin photographed by Jim Marshall in her apartment on Lyon Street in San Francisco, 1968.  

New Janis Joplin Biography Reveals The Hard Work Behind The Heart

In the 1960s, Janis Joplin was an icon of the counterculture, a female rock star at a time when rock was an all-boys’ club.

“At that point in time there weren’t too many women taking center stage,” biographer Holly George-Warren says. “Janis created this incredible image that went along with her amazing vocal ability. … [She] was very, very different than most of the women that came before.”

On stage, Joplin oozed confidence, sexuality and exuberance. It all seemed so effortless, but George-Warren describes Joplin as a bookworm who worked hard to create her “blues feelin’ mama” musical persona.

“She was a real scholar of music. … She didn’t want people to know how hard she worked,” George-Warren says. “She wanted people to think she was just this vessel, or this megaphone, or something that was just up there on stage, and the music and emotions were just coming out of her.”

George-Warren says she decided to write about Joplin after listening to tapes from the Columbia Records vault of the singer’s recording session with producer Paul Rothchild for the album Pearl. (The album was released posthumously in 1971, following Joplin’s fatal overdose in 1970.)

“Rothchild [is] known for being this very authoritarian producer, but … Janis was just coming up with idea after idea,” George-Warren says. “She was basically co-producing this record with him. And that turned my head around. … I realized that that part of her story had not been told.”

George-Warren’s new biography is Janis.

Ronan Farrow: ‘Catch And Kill’ Tactics Protected Both Weinstein And Trump

Ronan Farrow’s 2017 exposé of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the #MeToo movement. Now, in his new book, Catch and Kill, Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly used in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.

“Harvey Weinstein’s attorneys … signed a contract with this Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube explicitly tasking secret agents with killing reporting on Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow says. “There was a full-on international espionage operation that was built up around this.”

Farrow says that he was followed and that his house was bugged as a result of his work on the story. He eventually moved into a safe house and put his reporting documents into a safe deposit box with a note reading, “Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.”

Farrow had started investigating Weinstein as a reporter at NBC News. But, he says, network executives blocked the story from ever being broadcast and eventually let Farrow go. Farrow speculates that the network was doing so, in part, to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct. Farrow spoke about NBC’s efforts to stifle the Weinstein story in this NPR interview. NBC News has maintained that Farrow’s story on the sexual misconduct allegations was not solid — that he had no accusers on record, specifically — when it refused to move forward with the story in 2017 before he took it to The New Yorker.

Farrow notes that NBC’s efforts to quash the story are part of a broader “catch and kill” strategy, whereby powerful entities and individuals go to extreme lengths to keep unfavorable stories from being reported. His book alleges that American Media Inc., the parent company of the tabloid National Enquirer, engaged in such practices in an effort to control negative stories about then- presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“I personally reported a number of stories about cases in which AMI sought or actually did buy the rights to a story in order to get rid of it during the election, and that subsequently has become the subject of a serious criminal investigation,” Farrow says.

He adds that the practice of catch and kill is “used both literally in the plot with respect to several stories that AMI goes after and tries to bury for Donald Trump and others, but also figuratively about the media’s role in sometimes not just advancing, but also suppressing, stories.”

Photo: A.J. Chavar for NPR

Happy birthday to the great Buster Keaton. He was born on this day (Oct. 4) in 1895. 

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Robert Hunter

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Remembering Grateful Dead Lyricist Robert Hunter

Ta-Nehisi Coates On Magic, Memory And The Underground Railroad

Growing up in Maryland, author Ta-Nehisi Coates was enthralled by stories of Harriet Tubman, the 19th century abolitionist who operated the Underground Railroad on the state’s Eastern Shore. He read about Tubman’s efforts to lead enslaved people to freedom, and was struck by the surreal qualities of her story.

“It just seemed wild,” he says. “Who is this person who has fainting spells and yet has never lost a passenger? Who is this black woman in the 19th century who, when somebody is scared and wants to turn back pulls out a gun and made threats, ‘You ain’t turning back!’? Who is this person who just strides through history?”

Coates read one biography of Tubman in which the biographer admitted that historians aren’t quite sure how she managed to lead so many people to freedom. “Whenever I hear, 'We don’t know how this happens,’ my mind starts turning, you know? I start imagining things,” he says.

Coates had always been a fan of comic books and pulpy adventure stories, and he began to imagine the Underground Railroad through fantastical eyes. His debut novel, The Water Dancer, is set in slave times and centers on Hiram, a man born into slavery who meets Tubman, and learns that they share a magical power to teleport enslaved people to freedom.

“I did a considerable amount of research, and when you look at how African Americans described themselves during that period, and when you look at how they talk about their own escapes from slavery, magic is often very much a part [of it],” he says. “The Water Dancer … tries to take a somewhat forgotten tradition in African American resistance and render it seriously.”

Photo: Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

Tegan And Sara Find Pain — And Unexpected Joy — In ‘High School’

High school was a tumultuous time for Canadian identical twins Tegan and Sara Quin. They both, separately, were coming to terms with their sexuality — and they were also beginning to write and record songs together.

“Almost right away, we started to weave our voices together. That was something that we had an instinct to do,” Tegan says.

The music Tegan and Sara made in those early years helped jump-start their career. In 1998, when were 18, they signed a contract with PolyGram Records, which eventually led to a tour with Neil Young. They’ve since won awards for their music, including three Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy.

Now, the sisters revisit their early years with the memoir High School, along with the companion record, Hey, I’m Just Like You. The new record features songs they wrote as teenagers — but re-recorded as adults.

Sara was initially reluctant to listen to the songs they recorded in high school. “I was afraid that I would hear something that I that I would be embarrassed by or ashamed of,” she says.

But, she adds, “When I finally did listen, I was struck by the joy in our voices in our early recordings. … We were great, and we were writing these really sophisticated, adventurous songs as teenagers. And that was why we ended up signing a record deal as teenagers and starting our career.”

Tegan likens finding the balance between their teenage and present identities to mixing a cocktail: “We threw in a lot of different things from the last 20-some years, and hoped that if Tegan and Sara from 1997 could get in a time machine and hear it, that they wouldn’t be embarrassed by how we changed it.”

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“The enemy up here is not a person or a thing. It’s the endless void.”

– Ad Astra (2019) dir. James Gray

The science-fiction drama Ad Astra stars Brad Pitt as an astronaut who sets out on a dangerous voyage to the outer reaches of the solar system. It’s the latest picture from the writer-director James Gray, whose earlier movies include We Own the Night, Two Lovers and The Lost City of Z. Our film critic, Justin Chang, says Ad Astra is a space odyssey that sometimes stumbles but ultimately soars.

The most striking of the movie’s many effects may be Pitt’s performance, which couldn’t be more different from his recent work in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. In that movie, Pitt was all swaggering physicality. In Ad Astra, he’s almost otherworldly in his stillness, holding the camera’s gaze with eyes that seem to contain multitudes. He shows us a man getting back in touch with his deep-est emotions, and makes that experience deeply emotional for us in turn. If that’s not a sign of intelligent life at the movies, I don’t know what is.