Meryl and Her First Love

From Sophie’s Choice to The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep has enthralled us for almost 40 years in many roles. For nearly all that time Meryl, who is 65 on June 22, has been happily married to just one man – a rarity for the film world.

But her husband was not her ‘first love’.

Today’s Needull is an insightful account of her tragic love affair with the equally talented John Cazale (best known as Fredo Corleone in the Godfather movies, and one who exemplified the 70’s French notion of jolie laide, or “ugly-beautiful”). At the end of it, I’m sure, your respect for this amazing actress and human being will go up a few notches further.

For all her later accomplishments — 19 Academy Award nominations, the most of any actress in history, and three wins — her friends and fellow actors most admire Streep for her devotion to Cazale, for the strength of character such a young woman showed.

Full Article Here

NY Post – Maureen Callahan

Bonus Read – Edited extract from the book Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep, by Michael Schulman

Image Source

What The Job!!!

Let’s admit, most of us are in ‘meaningless jobs’. The value that we are adding is not worth the time, effort and paycheck that it garners. Sometimes, this feeling of ‘not being valuable enough’ and the purposelessness of all of this charade catches on us but most of the times, we just follow the herd. However, it’s time we stop being forced robots and assign our meaningless work to actual robots, and have meaningful education to perform meaningful jobs.

When we’ll be able to escape this cycle of meaningless jobs will we actually uncover our true potential. It’s high time and I sincerely hope the Needull below inspires you (and me) to do the same.

It starts with an age-old question: what is the meaning of life? Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.

Our definition of work, however, is incredibly narrow. Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment. Yet what happens when a growing proportion of people deemed successful by the measure of our knowledge economy say their work is pointless?

Full Article Here

World Economic Forum – Rutger Bregman

Bonus Read: The End of Meaningless Jobs Will Unleash the World’s Creativity

Image Source

A Culinary Pilgrimage

Just like the one posted yesterday, this Needull is also an engaging travelogue about a birthplace. However in complete contrast to yesterday’s account, this article explores the origins of my favorite ‘Chindian’ dish – Chilli Chicken. For someone who absolutely loves the heavenly combo of Egg Fried Rice and Chilli Chicken and orders the same divine dish, be it in the swanky lounge at Taj Colaba or a alley-side hawker stall at Tangra, this is no less a ‘pilgrimage’ than the one you read about yesterday.

Before the Chinese arrived in Kolkata, the city’s restaurant culture was limited to Indian cuisine. Biryani and Kolkata rolls were the go-tos for fast food. It took nearly a century after the first Chinese immigrants arrived for Hakka food to become an intrinsic part of the city’s culinary landscape, thanks both to the mix of ingredients in Chinese kitchens and the marriage of Chinese men to Indian women. Like Schezwan sauce, other dishes were created exclusively for Indian tastes: potatoes were deep-fried and doused in chili, fried eggs and peppers were added to noodles, and the slow Indianisation of Chinese food began.

Full Article Here

Vice – Sharanya Deepak

Bonus: Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipe of ‘Banarasi’ Chilli Chicken

Image Source

It Happened… in One Scene

‘It Happened One Night’ (the original movie that inspired at least 4 Bollywood movies that I can think of) is a must watch for any movie buff. But this 1934 classic is also famous for its unintended consequences – from inspiring the characterisation of Bugs Bunny to dramatically plummeting the sale of sleeveless vests; the later being the topic of our Needull.

In the middle of this movie, in a first-of-its-kind undressing sequence, Gable decided to let go of his sleeveless undershirt as it was causing problem with his dialogue delivery. The undershirts were a universal thing back then and some sources say that within a couple of years of the movie’s release, due to Gable’s revolutionary decision not to wear vest, its sales dropped to over 80% and the very concept of such vests was obsoleted (the vests came back in fashion after World War II but in the T-shirt form, while the sleeveless form continued only in tropical countries like India). Today’s Needull revisits this ‘rumour’ and investigates the truth in it, based on old newspaper clips and industry statistics.

Those who spread the fact cannot prove it. Those who disagree cannot disprove it. This is how conspiracy theories are born. Both sides can only offer evidence though they usually only offer supporting evidence.

Full Article Here

Immortal Ephemera – Cliff Aliperti

Movie clip of the above scene – Youtube

Bonus Read: Jim Carroll’s blog on the above and other idiosyncrasies related to the movie

Image Source

Surviving In A Zombieland

“It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when.”

The zombie apocalypse, be it due to movies or television or pulp fiction, is something we all have had nightmares about, but it might surprise you to learn a lot of researchers argue that a real zombie plague could be closer than you think. Well, so what should one be doing to survive such an apocalypse. Simply hiding inside buildings – or God forbid, running around smashing zombie skulls with a baseball bat – is a terrible idea, even though countless Z movies across the world, from Dawn of the Dead to Go Goa Gone, suggest the same.

Well, today’s Needull comes to your rescue. Pentagon wrote a 31-page report on how military should tackle a zombie uprising (as a training scenario, not based on some research….. hah!!) and this now declassified document is available for download on Scribd. So, browse through the manual and get prepared for ‘The Walking Dead’….

Will it really be useful? Well, only time will tell and hopefully we’ll never have to find out.

Full Report Here

Image Source

Singapore is Growing… In Size

Thanks to ever-improving land reclamation technologies, Singapore has increased its land mass by 22% since the city-state’s independence in 1965 and plans to add another 8% to it by 2030. So, basically by 2030, close to one-fourth of Singaporean land would have been ‘created’. Today’s Needull is a detailed and engaging story about how Singapore is unveiling the oceans to achieve this amazing feat.

In the Tolstoy short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” a peasant muses in frustration: “Our only trouble is that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself.”

Similar thoughts must have struck Lee Kuan Yew, who cast Singapore in his vision. Through his three decades as prime minister, Lee saw his country as locked in a struggle against its size. Singapore was a tiny nation, and dire fates awaited tiny nations that could not take care of themselves. “In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp,” he once said.

Full Article Here

NY Times – Samanth Subramanian

Image Source

The House Always Wins

After a spate of failed investments, I have come to realize the indubitable truth, that even seasoned investors like Warren Buffet admit to, that no one can consistently and predictably beat any sufficiently large market over an extended period of time.

It just doesn’t work this way.

What you can do is to work on gaining from spillovers, manipulate certain specifics for your benefit and be wary of what analysts at CNBC or Bloomberg say. On that ironical note, today’s Needull is a Bloomberg article on why it is impossible to ‘beat the market’.

Most of us have a vague sense that we’re being ripped off by investment firms that charge hefty fees while producing results that are no better than you’d get throwing darts at a page of stock listings. It’s troubling nonetheless to find out we’re correct. And it’s important to understand the mechanics of what has gone wrong.

Full Article Here

Bloomberg – Peter Coy

Image Source

The Last Love Letter

He is an easy man to fall in love with. I did it in one day.

It is not exactly a love letter.

But in the guise of a dating profile for her soon-to-be-single husband, Amy Krouse Rosenthal pours out her unabating love for the man she has cherished for 26 years. Today’s Needull is one of those heart-wrenching love stories which cause that strange knot in throat and that odd tingle in stomach. Get ready for an emotional ride.

So many plans instantly went poof.

No trip with my husband and parents to South Africa. No reason, now, to apply for the Harvard Loeb Fellowship. No dream tour of Asia with my mother. No writers’ residencies at those wonderful schools in India, Vancouver, Jakarta.

No wonder the word cancer and cancel look so similar.

This is when we entered what I came to think of as Plan “Be,” existing only in the present. As for the future, allow me to introduce you to the gentleman of this article, Jason Brian Rosenthal.

Full Essay Here

The New York Times – Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Image Source

Note: Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a renowned children’s book author and radio host, died on March 13, 2017, 10 days after this love-essay was published. You can read her obituary here.

Why is #vanlife the latest travel fad?

If you have not heard of the latest hashtag in trend (#vanlife), please do search it now. You will be treated to beautiful Instagram pictures of old and new vans parked in beautiful locales, captioned with some quote about how to get out of our houses and start living in a van. Across the world, hundreds of youngsters, couples and loners, millionaires and homeless, are travelling in vans living a seemingly pleasant dream with its own set of nightmares. Today’s Needull, a recent article on The New Yorker, will give you a glimpse of the #vanlife of a couple named Emily King and Corey Smith.

Scroll through the images tagged #vanlife on Instagram and you’ll see plenty of photos that don’t have much to do with vehicles: starry skies, campfires, women in leggings doing yoga by the ocean. Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job.

Full Article Here

The New Yorker – Rachel Munroe

Featured Image Source

Cinema Sans Color

Today’s Needull is a Youtube video from the always-so-awesome RocketJump Film School on the importance of the use of Black & White in Cinema. From the brief history of black & white movies to different forms of cinema developed due to limited technology to modern cinemas re-released in black & white, this narrative is an eye opener for anyone who thinks colours add life to movies.

Sometimes, it is the lack of them that does.

“Black and white” isn’t actually a genre of film. Rather, there are a multitude of different kinds of films that have all used black and white as a unique storytelling tool. Cinema’s history of black and white film is a rich one, filled with movies that have defined the very essence of cinema, that invite you to escape into new worlds, see things in new ways, experience the thrill and strangeness of fantasy, as well as the severity and truth of the real world. This video will explore how filmmakers have used black-and-white to the story’s advantage, and why it can be so beautiful and compelling.

Full Video Here

A Related Article by Adrienne Reid

Image Source