Dear Friend,

Welcome back to WORLD’s Muse newsletter on arts and culture.

“I know the Golden Globes don’t mean much,” my husband Jonathan said this week while scrambling the morning eggs, “but did you see the nomination list is out?”

He and I had had a movie and dessert date the night before. We saw a quiet film getting Oscar noise, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. The film follows two cousins as they travel to Poland, the home of their late grandmother. Kieran Culkin (brother to Macaulay of Home Alone fame) got a supporting actor nomination for his portrayal of the more charming but also more volatile cousin. (A warning: A Real Pain earns its R rating for foul language, onscreen drug use, and discussion of a suicide attempt.)

“You don’t see many stories like that anymore,” Jonathan said the night before between bites of hazelnut mousse. “A really brotherly story.”

“And a small story,” I agreed. “So small you can recognize people you know in it.”

The first award show of the season, the Globes are known for glamour, irreverence, and booze. But A Real Pain is about loving regular people well even though it is hard, even though they make you crazy and they don’t always seem to deserve your care.

Jonathan and I agreed over eggs that Culkin’s nomination was warranted, as was Eisenberg’s for lead actor.

More Musings

At the box office: Moana 2 and Wicked: Part One continued to triumph last week at the box office, earning $51.3 million and $36.5 million, respectively, and again making history for earnings on that December weekend. Some critics wish studios would have spent the weekend on another opening, capitalizing on moviegoing appetites by releasing something big and fresh instead.

The end of the Eras, plus a timeless tune: Taylor Swift is hanging up her sparkly leotards, asymmetrical black bodysuits, and shimmering ballgowns after her Eras Tour—which brought in approximately $2.2 billion, making it the highest-grossing concert tour of all time for a second year in a row. Eras, and Swift’s copious repertoire characterized by tonal shifts, has made the world contemplate how many phases a person can go through in just a couple of decades. Today is Swift’s 35th birthday.

Still rockin’: Swift shares her birthday week with rockabilly singer Brenda Lee, who turned 80 on Wednesday. At 13, Lee recorded “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” That was 1958, but the song got its big boost when it was featured in Home Alone in 1992. Last year, it even unseated Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” at the top of the Billboard charts.

“Literally” is here to stay, nonliterally: Does the nonliteral misuse of the word vex you? If so, prepare for further agitation. At The Conversation, linguist Valerie M. Fridland claims the ubiquitous adverb isn’t going anywhere. But in her view, that’s not a cause for despair. She says “literally” “is certainly far from the first word in English to have shifted toward its opposite. For instance, when in 1667’s Paradise Lost John Milton writes, ‘The Serpent … with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific,’ the word ‘terrific’ is absolutely intended in its original sense of ‘terrifying’ as opposed to our modern ‘fabulous’ take.” Indeed, a sense of history can waylay many kinds of panic.

A Kiwi takes the Spanish Scrabble title: Congratulations to Nigel Richards, a non-Spanish speaker who just won the Scrabble Spanish-language world title. For Richards, Scrabble is all about math and memorization, not language. He avoids interviews, but his mom, Adrienne Fischer, gave us some insight. Though her son has a reputation for being the greatest Scrabble player of all time, she says he never went to college and wasn’t especially good at English in school. “I don’t think he ever read a book,” she told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010, “apart from the dictionary.”

A Christmas gift from James Patterson: The bestselling novelist James Patterson is awarding $500 holiday bonuses to 600 booksellers this year. Patterson says, “Booksellers save lives. Period.”

WORLD-wide reports

• WORLD Opinions contributor Ray Hacke tells us about a group of University of Nebraska women athletes using their star power to advocate for the unborn. He writes that these female Huskers stand out because they’re some of the few women in the sports world decrying abortion.
• On The World and Everything In It, Amy Lewis gives us a surprising story about shape-note singing and Australia, two subjects I never expected to see in the same sentence. I learned to sing shape notes at Ben Speer’s Stamps-Baxter School of Music in Tennessee when I was 12, so I’ve always associated that strange but powerful notation with the American South.

What’s on my bookshelf this week

The first time I saw WORLD’s Andrew Belz after Hurricane Helene, he recommended a great book to me: Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag. My reading life was already busy, but he sold it so well that I ordered a copy the next day. Andrew told me this novel about settling the American Plains features some surprisingly Christian elements—but I can’t confirm this yet. I’m unwinding slowly into this book, which has the perfect thickness and cozy tone of a long winter read. Join me on the adventure.

Curtain call

I hope you’ve had a truly peaceful second week of Advent. At the kids’ book club that meets at my house, I read O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” frantically rephrasing some of the archaic verbiage and complicated syntax as I went. By utter fluke, we read the story on the anniversary of its publication. “Dec. 10, 1905,” I mused. “How many years ago was that?”

My 8-year-old, who’s very good at math, said, “119.”

As we read, I kept asking the kids questions to make sure they were listening. “What do you think Jim will get Della for Christmas?” They all hoped he would get her a cat.

At the end, I asked, “Why were Della and Jim both wise and foolish?”

“They were wise because they loved each other …” one began.

Another finished, “… and foolish because they didn’t get a cat.”

One of these answers is right and one is wrong. But I take what I can get.

Joy to you,

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