Pop Culture

The giant conifer resists mockery

It’s easy to be snarky or cynical about holiday schmaltz like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, which will be lit in a ceremony on Wednesday night. But, as TIME’s Richard Corliss pointed out in an essay that appeared in the magazine 20 years ago this month, it’s also easy to get swept away.

That’s because the holiday festivities represent a way to pretend the world is a little bit, well, easier:

In its totality, the visit is a time trip to a prettier New York and a sweeter America. ”When I was little, I used to come with my grandmother,” says Nancy Murray of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, of her annual trip to Radio City. ”I loved it; the show always gave me the Christmas spirit. It still does. And when my son is old enough, I hope he will come with his grandmother.”

The big Christmas tree — like window shopping and productions of The Nutcracker — is a symbol of that fantasy.

Read the full essay here, in the TIME Vault: I Like New York in Yule

Howard made a brief appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy this summer

Howard the Duck, the character who got a cameo at the very end of James Gunn’s blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy this summer, will get his own ongoing comic book series next year.

The character will become a private investigator in the Marvel Universe in the new series, which will be written by Chip Zdarsky with art by Joe Quinones, the Hollywood Reporter said.

In the 1970s, the character was the star of a satire on pop culture in a monthly comic book, a newspaper strip, and even a 1976 presidential run.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

"For me it's all about what I want to say with the records"

This post originally appeared on Rolling Stone.

It’s been just over a year since Lorde released her now-platinum debut, Pure Heroine, where she sang wistfully about “getting on my first plane.” The 18-year-old has since racked up major frequent-flier miles, becoming an alt-pop cultural icon (two South Park parodies in one month!) along the way. In October, her tour finally led back to her native New Zealand: “It definitely feels like a bit of a victory lap,” she says. She’s also found time to assemble an eclectic soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 – and to give passing thought to a new album of her own. Here’s what we learned checking in with pop’s most talented teen.

MORE: Lorde Shares Alluring ‘Hunger Games’ Single ‘Yellow Flicker Beat’

She’s the Boss
“Everyone my age read the books and saw the films,” Lorde says of Hunger Games. “I got a call: ‘You’ve been asked to write the end-credit song.’ But I wanted ownership in the process. They came back: ‘Would you like to do the soundtrack?’ I was like, ‘Uh, that would work.'” She appeared on five tracks, including a Diplo-produced duet with Ariana Grande and a collaboration with the Chemical Brothers and R&B star Miguel (“He’s the best possible person with vocal melodies that I know”) – and also got Kanye West to “rework” her single “Yellow Flicker Beat.” (“He’s so private I feel weird talking about how he does stuff. I feel lucky to even be in a room with him.”)

In addition to Grace Jones (“this high priestess presiding over us all”) and Charli XCX, the LP spotlights rising artists like Raury, Tinashe and XOV – “artists I heard on YouTube and had 10,000 hits. I thought what they were doing was cool and could be taken to a different, interesting place.”

MORE: In Pics: Lorde: The Rolling Stone Cover Shoot

Nirvana Changed Her Life
Lorde is still processing her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance with the surviving members of Nirvana last April. “I knew it was a big deal,” she says, “but I don’t think I really understood how much weight those three minutes had. It was over in the blink of an eye for me, but it’s kind of lasted. There’s a song on the soundtrack that’s just me and an organ, and it’s cool to hear my voice again in that kind of vein that I did with ‘All Apologies.'”

MORE: Rolling Stone’s 25 Greatest Movie Soundtracks of All Time

She’s Taking Her Time With Her Next Album
“I’m very tentatively starting,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of writing, lyrically, but I started the soundtrack just as I was getting into album stuff, and that took up all of my creative head. But I have been plotting out ideas. I guess other people don’t write like that, but for me it’s all about what I want to say with the records. I don’t really have any sort of timetable. I’m not in any kind of rush. Part of me thinks that the longer I leave it, the better a musician I’ll be. [Laughs] I used to do the same thing with homework! But I don’t know if I’ll be good at having time off.”

MORE: Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

The two men are 17th cousins

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch is distantly related to Alan Turing, his character in newly released film The Imitation Game, genealogists claim.

Turing was a mathematician and code breaker who helped alter the course of World War II by breaking the Enigma code and creating a machine that allowed Britain and the U.S. to read secret German messages.

Researchers from the family-history website Ancestry have now said that Cumberbatch, 38, is actually Turing’s 17th cousin, sharing a common ancestor back in 14th century England. Tracing the paternal lines of both men revealed that the pair are related to John Beaufort, the first Earl of Somerset, who was born around 1373.

Miriam Silverman, U.K. content manager for Ancestry, said: “It’s amazing to think that that when stepping into the role of Alan Turing, he would not only be portraying a world-class code breaker but a real-life relation.”

[Daily Telegraph]

Monroe’s “Lost Archives” is a collection of 300 items including letters, photographs, paintings and clothes

Correction appended Nov. 12, 1:19 p.m. ET

A collection of love letters and other memorabilia belonging to Marilyn Monroe will go up for auction next month at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Monroe’s “Lost Archives” is a collection of 300 items including letters from her second husband, baseball star Joe Dimaggio, that were sent just before their divorce, the Associated Press reports.

“I love you and want to be with you,” Dimaggio wrote in one letter. “There is nothing I would like better than to restore your confidence in me.”

Also found in the trove are correspondences from her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and from friends including Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Jane Russell, along with various paintings, photographs and clothes.

The curators are expecting a huge turnout for the auction, which will run Dec. 5-6.

“We anticipate a lot of fans will be here. They’ll fly in from all over the world,” said auction owner Darren Julien, who estimates some pieces could go for more than $1 million.

The collection will be put on display for the public four days before bidding begins.

This article originally misstated the profession of Joe Dimaggio. He was a baseball player.

Nov. 5, 1935: Parker Brothers begins marketing the game Monopoly

When Parker Brothers rolled the dice on “the real estate game,” it did so reluctantly. The game seemed too long, too complicated, and too niche: who, after all, would get excited about buying imaginary realty in Atlantic City?

The brainchild of an out-of-work heating contractor named Charles Darrow, according to the New York Times, the game that became Monopoly wildly outperformed Parker Brothers’ modest expectations, becoming the most popular game in history. Although they initially rejected Darrow’s offer to sell it to them, the powers that be at Parker Brothers changed their minds after the independently manufactured game began flying off the shelves of a Philadelphia department store, though the company still believed the game was a fad that would soon fade. They began marketing it as Monopoly on this day, Nov. 5, in 1935.

Monopoly sales soon made Darrow so rich that he abandoned the heating trade for a hothouse hobby: growing orchids. According to Hasbro, which acquired Parker Brothers in 1991, more than 275 million Monopoly games — including more than 6 billion green houses and 2.25 billion red hotels — have been sold since 1935.

And while Monopoly remains a fixture in American homes, it has undergone periodic changes in an effort to stay relevant. Last year, following a vote on the Monopoly Facebook page, game lovers chose a new token — a cat, which triumphed over proposed tokens including a toy robot, a guitar, a helicopter, and a diamond ring — to replace the least popular of the existing tokens: the iron. It wasn’t the first upheaval among the tokens, which have at times included a purse, a lantern, an elephant, a horse and rider, and a rocking horse. The game board has gone through a number of updates, too, and met with mixed reviews.

In 1978, to celebrate the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City, Parker Brothers released a new version called “Advance to Boardwalk,” which allowed players to build casinos, according to the Times. It never became popular.

In 2006, Hasbro released the “Here and Now” edition, meant to bring the game into the 21st century — in all its branded glory — with corporatized tokens including McDonald’s fries, a Starbucks coffee cup, a New Balance sneaker and a Toyota Prius. According to TIME’s coverage of the new edition, the properties in that version:

… include real estate from around the country, selected by online vote. The railroads have become airports. Weimar-style hyperinflation has set in–for passing Go, you collect $2 million–but Times Square is a bargain at $4 mil, and while it’s a refreshing admission that, yes, you can buy the White House, it cost the present occupant far more than $3.2 million.

This spring, Hasbro adopted a grassroots approach to improving the game by polling players on their “house rules,” acknowledging their findings that half of all Monopoly players have made up their own rules and 68% have never read the official rules all the way through. The House Rules Edition includes the five most popular of those made-up rules, which include doubling the amount collected for passing “Go,” collecting an additional $500 for rolling “snake eyes,” and not collecting rent while in jail.

To appease purists, Hasbro points out that these rules are, of course, entirely optional.

Read more about the 2006 edition of Monopoly, here in TIME’s archives: Monopoly in Elysium