Many of us have been spending more time at home over the past 10 months, and a lot more of that time has been spent alone. With the coronavirus pandemic cutting off access to friends and social circles, and all the places we used to gather, that’s no surprise. And if you’re by yourself, you’ve […]
Leslie Bridgers
Columnist
Leslie Bridgers is a columnist for the Portland Press Herald, writing about Maine culture, customs and the things we notice and wonder about in our everyday lives. Originally from Connecticut, Leslie came to Maine by way of Bowdoin College and never left. She joined the Portland Press Herald in 2011 as a reporter and spent seven years as the paper’s features editor, overseeing coverage of arts, entertainment and food.
Posted inCookbook Reviews
Travel-imbued cookbooks offer up culinary journeys
On a gray afternoon in November, I sat down to a meal that evoked Istanbul cafes where just the year before I had feasted at the edge of the sun-streaked Bosporus. Dried sumac speckled a plate of shaved radishes and fennel, and the main course was lamb ragout, ladled over satiny eggplant puree. It was […]
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Posted inArts & Entertainment
Larry King’s long run made the case that there’s no such thing as a dumb question
Larry King’s vintage microphone, the RCA Type 77-D that referenced his rise as a radio man, was a prop that worked as a powerful symbol of both past and present in a relentlessly evolving media age. The microphone was a security blanket for everyone involved: for King, for his 60,000 interview subjects, and for the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
Rich ambiguity elevates and frustrates in the noirish thriller ‘The Little Things’
Set in 1990, in a time before the ubiquity of cellphones and the kind of advanced, rapid DNA profiling that would come to revolutionize criminal forensics, “The Little Things” isn’t just a retro serial-killer thriller, but a deeply noirish one, harking back to not just “Seven,” but to the delicious moral ambiguity of black-and-white films […]
Posted inRecipes
Trinidad-style aloo and channa infuses an Indian classic with Caribbean flavor
There’s no denying the simplicity of Trinidad-style aloo and channa. Creamy Yukon Gold potatoes are coated in curry powder, then simmered until soft. Canned chickpeas are added, and the whole pot is then zapped with a bright burst of aromatics and heat. This vegan mash-up is both fortifying and forgiving; it sticks to one’s bones […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Deep Water: ‘Listening To John Coltrane With My Baby Daughter,’ by David Stankiewicz
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
Art review: Dowling Walsh show represents the range of abstract expressionism
‘Into the Abstract’ runs through Feb. 27 at the Rockland gallery.
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth burn brilliantly, but with understatement, in ‘Supernova’
The film “Supernova” is a small and superficially tidy thing, notwithstanding the astronomical implications of its title, which augurs the sudden explosion of a star or – more metaphorically – some brilliant light, often heralding its extinguishment. It seems, at first, an odd allusion for a road-trip story that takes place largely inside a boxy […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
New one-man play aims to dispel myths about the sexuality of the disabled
Ryan J. Haddad dials up the candor early on in “Hi, Are You Single?” The autobiographical one-man play, which begins streaming Monday on demand via D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in association with Los Angeles’s Iama Theatre Company, opens with a phone-sex scene. A playwright and actor known in part for his recurring role on […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Review
‘Locked Down’ mirrors our quarantine experiences
Doug Liman’s ‘Locked Down,’ one of the first and most ambitious films to be conceived and shot during the pandemic, is like our own quarantine experiences.