"I’ve seen it at least fifty times. I often put it on as I’m working or eating breakfast. Kore-eda has made several great, empathetic films––After Life, Nobody Knows, and the underappreciated I Wish––but for me Still Walking is his best. He made it shortly after his mother died, and you can tell. The film’s extraordinary warmth and humor are animated by deep feelings of grief and bitter disappointment. That emotional confusion exists in balance with his formal precision, restraint, and command of detail, and the result is remarkably, minutely true. It makes me happy."

"The documentarians David and Albert Maysles found some real-life Tennessee Williams characters in Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, mother and daughter eccentrics holed up for years in a sagging, cat-and-raccoon-infested mansion in otherwise grand East Hampton. The ladies’ kinship with cousin Jackie Bouvier Kennedy explains their old-money sense of entitlement, but nothing can explain why two people would want to hammer away at each other for decades on end the way these two trapped souls do. Except that maybe you’d do the same thing under the same circumstances. I’d like to think I would, anyway."

"This convinced me that grief gets easier - In The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta takes an absurd premise—the Rapture has actually occurred—and turns it into a meditation on loss and love. For me, the most difficult thing about getting older has been the loss of my loved ones, particularly my mother. Perrotta explores exactly that: How do we continue to live in a world where the possibility of loss lurks around every corner? I remember sitting on my porch last summer and bursting into tears at the end, not because it's sad but because it's so hopeful."

"Pier Paolo Pasolini’s affection and compassion for Rome’s cafoni, or peasant, class shines through in what is perhaps the most accessible of all his films. Anna Magnani plays an ex-hooker trying to escape her past while raising her troubled teenage son. Pasolini sets Magnani loose as the indomitable salt-of-the-earth mother. Her range of emotion and expression is unbridled, exuberant, and overflowing—a force of nature. Pay attention to the wedding scene and you’ll see Pasolini’s love of Renaissance art on display as he re-creates Da Vinci’s Last Supper, casting the denizens of Rome’s slums as the apostles."

"800 or so pages this is the perfect book for a week-long vacation. From humble beginnings to the height of great power Rockefeller did it all. I think you’ll find he has more in common with Marcus Aurelius than today’s billionaires. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded “the Octopus” by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America."

"It’s about how feminism fails to address the relationship between mothers and daughters because of its emphasis on escaping the house. I didn’t finish it—who has the time or the energy to read when you’re a new mom?—but I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things—a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace."