In a beginning as splashy as most finales, director-writer Brad Bird's The Incredibles 2 picks up right where its predecessor ended. The mole-man Underminer escapes with Mr. Incredible clinging to the side of his burrowing hell machine, churning scree right in the hero's extra-large face. During the conflict, the superpowered family accidentally trash the city, even as their government liaison, Rick Dicker (voiced by Jonathan Banks), is donning an aloha shirt in preparation for retirement. The Incredibles--dad Bob (voiced by Craig T. Nelson), mom Helen (Holly Hunter) and their three kids--go on the lam to a cheap motel. Their friend, the super-cool Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), brings news of private sector help from the Deavers, a brother » Read More

Before he became the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Fred Rogers was the last face many an enemy of America saw. His expertise in hand to hand combat sent scores of Nazis to Valhalla. Behind the calm facade, there was a battle-scarred commando wracked by flashbacks. Once, Rogers attacked Henrietta Pussycat while roaring, "Why won't you die, Kraut?" As Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor? demonstrates, the above paragraph is a gratuitous lie, justifiable only because it is something people want to believe. Proof: five million hits on Google for the search string "Mr. Rogers Navy SEAL." Years after his death in 2003, we still can't believe Rogers was really that big a marshmallow. If Rogers never saw combat, he demonstrated a » Read More

In Finks, playwright Joe Gilford imagines the lives of his showbiz parents, Madeline and Jack Gilford, at a crucial point in the beginning of their 40-year marriage. Their fictional counterparts are Mickey (Jim Stanek), a stand-up comedian, and Natalie (Donna Vivino), an actress and activist. They meet in a nightclub where Mickey's performing. Natalie sees him and decides for the both of them that they're meant for each other. And despite the fact that they're both attached to other people when they first meet, the drama of their romantic coupling is only the framing device for writer Gilford's agenda. Finks is set during the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings dominated the headlines. » Read More

Other than a brief fascination with Mad Men in the Obama years, Americans have never shown much of an interest in the internal dramas of the advertising industry. It has always been the Rodney Dangerfield of the mass media, always looking for respect and not finding it. But in his new book, journalist Ken Auletta reminds us of the one inescapable truth behind advertising that commands respect. However much you may be annoyed by ads and commercial encroachment in public space, advertising pays the bills for all that great content you and I enjoy every day. From his perch at The New Yorker, Auletta has become one of the country's most prominent observers of the ad game. On Thursday, June 14, he comes to Kepler's in Menlo Park to discuss » Read More

Hai Bo strips the human figure of its individuality in his solo exhibit "The Southern Series" (now at Pace Gallery) without destroying the narratives in these black and white photographs. Faces are turned away from or oblivious to the camera, darkened by shadows or otherwise obstructed from view. Bo assigns each work in the series a number rather than a name, a system that encourages an unregulated response from the viewer. "No. 55" features three pillared shrines receding at a perpendicular angle to the grayed-out horizon line. In front of them, a woman stands in the foreground, just off center. She casts an Orphic gaze into the distance, finding nobody behind her in that dusky world. » Read More

TMy afternoon begins with a leisurely stroll through downtown Campbell, but the quiet is soon interrupted as I step through the door of the former Gaslighter Theater. I am immediately greeted with the sounds of bells, whistles, laughter--and a very distinct "wakka, wakka, wakka..." that I hadn't heard in years. I peer into the corner and witness a group of young adults sipping on cold draft beers while playing four-player Pac-Man Battle Royale, then I almost trip over a pack of young kids darting across the room. They move from machine to machine like bees pollinating flowers, but instead of buzzing, they laugh and are enthralled by these 8-bit relics of days past. » Read More

The author James Joyce harbored a love-hate relationship with his hometown of Dublin, so he exiled himself to Trieste, a city at the tip of the Adriatic Sea, in what's now Italy. Since I've already written about Joyce's birthplace and gravesite, Trieste was the next logical destination. Although Trieste is where Joyce wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as The Dubliners and significant portions of Ulysses, he was not the only one whose ghost began to follow me around. An unapologetically trans-ethnic type of place, Trieste was for centuries the main port city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, it became part of Italy. After World War II, it became a free independent territory administered in two different » Read More

Some people are just irritating. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their ovaries. Women's house paint preferences, sadly, have not been a prolific area of scientific study. However, there was a bunch of research suggesting that women's mate preferences shift with their hormone levels during the menstrual cycle--for example, findings that women went for more masculine faces in the fertile phase of their cycle. But these studies had methodological shortcomings, which can lead to false positives. When psychologist Benedict Jones and his colleagues ran a study using more rigorous methodology to check these findings, they found "no compelling evidence that preferences for facial masculinity track changes in women's hormonal » Read More

My Aries acquaintance Tatiana decided to eliminate sugar from her diet. She drew up a plan to avoid it completely for 30 days, hoping to permanently break its hold over her. I was surprised to learn that she began the project by making a dessert altar in her bedroom, where she placed a chocolate cake and five kinds of candy. She testified that it compelled her willpower to work even harder and become even stronger than if she had excluded all sweet treats from her sight. Do you think this strenuous trick might work for you as you battle your own personal equivalent of a sugar addiction? If not, devise an equally potent strategy. You're on the verge of forever escaping a temptation that's no good for you. Or you're close to vanquishing an » Read More