John Powers

He treats the customers so rudely that, ironically, he becomes a sensation. Here, he approaches a white couple at a table. What?

The humor is slyer in my favorite mystery novel this year, The Lover of No Fixed Abode, by Carlo Frutero and Franco Lucentini, a hugely popular Italian literary team.

Set in Venice, it's about a middle-aged signora who's an art scout for big auction houses, who finds herself attracted to an enigmatic tour guide leader, Mr. Silvera, who seems to know everything and greets every situation with a different inflection of the word ah. The mystery is, who is he?

Shimmering with wit and bursting with an insider's knowledge of Venice, The Lover of No Fixed Abode builds to a solution so unexpected that not one person in a million will guess it. It's a minor classic. Two big classics are the 50s movies that got theatrical re-releases this year.

Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, in which a village hires seven swordsmen to protect them from bandits, and The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouseau's excruciatingly suspenseful story of four exiles in a poor Latin American town who must transport a shipment of nitroglycerin in ramshackle trucks. Both movies are magnificent in themselves. Their action scenes are still breathtaking.

But they possess a special interest because in them you can see a Japanese director and a French one laying down the template for today's Hollywood blockbusters. And they're better than our current action pictures in one crucial way. From their white-knuckle stunts to their revelations of character, everything in them is human scale.

My favorite sports movement this year was also Alive with Humanity. It featured Simone Biles, whose all-around gold medal at the Paris Olympics confirmed her as the greatest woman gymnast of all time. Yet what I loved wasn't her style in winning, which was, of course, phenomenal, but her grace in losing.

In the final event, the floor exercise, where she normally reigns supreme, she was bested by Rebecca Andrade, the superb Brazilian gymnast who'd spent her career losing over and over to Biles. And what did Biles do when she lost? She didn't cry, I'm still the GOAT. She didn't whine that the judges had cheated her. She didn't say that Andrade was lucky or actually no good.

Instead, on the medal stand, she and teammate Jordan Childs, who won bronze, literally bowed to Andrade. They bowed to her skill, to her bravery in overcoming multiple surgeries, to her always being a worthy opponent. It was a gesture of respect that, far from diminishing Biles, only made her greatness more incandescent. A valuable lesson as we entered the new year.

She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.

She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.

She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.

It's something that brings people together around the piano. It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous. It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.

It's something that brings people together around the piano. It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous. It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.

It's something that brings people together around the piano. It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous. It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.

I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.

I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.

I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.

I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first. You map it out and you create a form and then you allow for surprise. But you're really just executing on this thing that you compose before sitting at the piano. And it can be different every time.

I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first. You map it out and you create a form and then you allow for surprise. But you're really just executing on this thing that you compose before sitting at the piano. And it can be different every time.