DAD: Thank you all so much for coming. Like every year, we’re going to go around in a circle and read selections from the Haggadah. Everyone will get a turn and no one will be bored.

MOM: Everyone fill up your glasses! Bill, wine?

WACKY UNCLE: I don’t want to sing “Dayenu” too loudly again, threateningly emphasizing the ‘die’ part while glaring at my ex-wife, so I’ll stick with grape juice.

DAD: Is everyone ready to read?

SCAPEGOAT CHILD: Oh boy, I hope I get appointed ‘evil son’ again…

Julie Shain imagines the Passover Seder You Didn’t Have: http://nyr.kr/XlrqRN

“Stoker” is fundamentally a gothic horror story about the devastating power of secrets: India has been protected from ugliness by parents of good will, who keep it hidden; but the dark, suppressed knowledge bursts forth to destroy the family that the very repression was meant to protect, and the secrecy leaves most bereft the girl it was meant to sustain. In short, it’s a fiction on the subject of the fiction—the lies—on which a family and its mythology are based, and the devastatingly corrosive, corrupting power of those lies to undo the family, the sense of identity, and the values that are built on them.

Richard Brody reviews Park Chan-wook’s “Stoker”: http://nyr.kr/10aToBn

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Depressing” was the word used by everyone I spoke to about the film, but depressing has never been a descriptor that puts me off; it’s rare that a movie, even an aggressively tragic one, depresses me. More often, I find myself simply fascinated, and even delighted, by the range of emotions cinema can capture.

But “Amour” depressed me…

In my article about the Amy Bishop case in this week’s issue of the magazine, I describe visiting Sam and Judy Bishop at their house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and sitting with Judy while she flipped through photo albums that document, poignantly, life before the two calamities that shaped the family: the death of their son, Seth Bishop, at the age of eighteen, in 1986, when his sister Amy shot him (in what the family still maintains was an accident), and the 2010 rampage in which Amy shot six of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, in Huntsville. These pictures, which the Bishops shared with me, capture the family in happier times: during Seth’s short life and during the early years of Amy’s marriage, before the move to Huntsville. “We are damaged people,” Judy Bishop told me. “We’ll never be the same.”

Click-through for a slideshow of photos from the Bishop family album, and more from Patrick Radden Keefe on the tragic past of mass shooter Amy Bishop: http://nyr.kr/14HTlfj

Cartoon by Paul Karasik. For more: http://nyr.kr/W5IG8R

In the early eighties, the Brooklyn-born photographer Marc Asnin started taking photographs of his uncle and godfather, Charles Henschke, for an art-school assignment. Now complete in the form of a book and gallery show, Asnin’s series of gritty, black-and-white photographs offer a intimate look at Charlie’s life and struggles, and also chronicle Asnin’s evolving perceptions over three decades, from his boyhood admiration of a man he viewed as his street-savvy, gun-wielding uncle to the reality of an aging man man tormented by mental illness, drug addiction, and strained relationships. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/Uqh7Xk

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by Mike Twohy. For more: http://nyr.kr/QKqrIp

Cartoon of the night by Sidney Harris. For more: http://nyr.kr/Vkda5Q

A Sunday morning cartoon. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/OssoIP

“The Two Thousand Dollar Popsicle,” a story of summer doldrums, familial mishaps, and strange redemption by Thomas Beller: http://nyr.kr/PVGyvn