Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. The new play “Giant,” on Broadway, dramatizes the scandal around Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s-book author who, in the nineteen-eighties, began making antisemitic statements and invoking stereotypes about…
It was a given that HBO’s new Harry Potter series would race-swap characters. But no one expected that a black actor would be cast as pale-skinned Professor Severus Snape. We’re not going to get into how this casting can’t help but add a racial component to several events in Snape’s character arc. Subtexts that…
As HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series continues to face backlash before it even debuts, one star is making his stance clear. Following his casting as Dumbledore, John Lithgow recently clarified that he has never meet the books’ author J.K. Rowling, and he doesn’t agree with her anti-transgender views, which have plagued the show’s production. The…
