Shane Gillis, a comedian named last week to the “Saturday Night Live” cast before videos surfaced in which he used slurs and offensive language, will not be joining the show, the program announced on Monday.“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining ‘S.N.L.,’” a spokesperson for the show said in a statement on behalf of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and longtime executive producer. “We want ‘S.N.L.’ to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane…

Phyllis Newman, a Tony Award-winning actress who was a fixture of New York theater for more than a half-century, a familiar game show panelist and a fund-raiser on behalf of women in entertainment dealing with illness, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Amanda Green.Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden….

The battle for the streaming rights to 1990s sitcoms continued on Monday, when Netflix announced it had acquired the global rights to “Seinfeld.”The hit comedy will begin appearing on the streaming service in 2021. “Seinfeld” currently streams on Hulu in the United States and in many other countries on Amazon. Hulu has the rights to the show until June 2021. Netflix struck the deal with Sony Pictures Television, which distributes the show.The “Seinfeld” deal, which was reported earlier by The Los Angeles Times, comes in the middle of a frenzied…

On an intermittently sunny morning in August, the artist Peter McGough is in his Bushwick, Brooklyn, studio contemplating mortality. “People don’t want to talk about death, but when I talk about it, I start living,” he explains. “I think, I’m going to die. Wow! What a great opportunity to enjoy myself.” Ebullient and dressed in a blue plaid linen suit — which, he says, “certainly gets a lot of attention” — he gives the impression of someone who takes fun seriously.For 40 years, McGough, 61, has been in an artistic…

Last week’s Billboard album chart, led by the metal band Tool, was like a time warp from 15 years ago, when CDs were still king and digital music was an afterthought.But this week, the chart returns squarely to 2019 with the streaming domination of Post Malone.“Hollywood’s Bleeding” (Republic), the third album by Post Malone — a moody troubadour with a tattooed face — easily topped Billboard’s chart with the equivalent of 489,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen, giving Post Malone his second No. 1. “Hollywood’s Bleeding” had…

LONDON — Banksy, the world’s favorite artist-provocateur, is set to enjoy another moment of auction activism.The Bristol-born street artist created a global media sensation last October when one of his iconic “Girl With Balloon” paintings shredded itself moments after selling for one million pounds, or about $1.4 million, at Sotheby’s.Almost exactly a year later, on Oct. 3, another notable Banksy painting will be offered in the same London salesroom. With a valuation of £1.5 million to £2 million, it is expected to reach a new auction high for the elusive,…

A new era of the The Far Side, the newspaper strip by Gary Larson, is coming.Fans noticed over the weekend that the strip’s official website had been updated with a new cartoon and a message: “Uncommon, unreal, and (soon-to-be) unfrozen. A new online era of The Far Side is coming!”The cartoon, drawn by Larson, showed a man with an open flame, thawing a block of ice which encased many of the familiar cast of Far Side characters: a cow, a dog, a cave man, a child and a woman.The popular…

Season 5, Episode 4“I don’t want to be looked at anymore,” Whitney Solloway says. “I want to be the one that does the looking.”“That is where the power lies,” agrees the wealthy gallery owner to whom she is speaking. Soon she will tell him all her dreams — owning her own gallery, where she can foster new artists whose work shows her things she’s never seen before. Soon after that, she’ll be making love to her abusive ex-boyfriend while the owner looks on and masturbates. The quid pro quo is…

This novel is hard to quote. Nearly every other sentence contains pungent Anglo-Saxon nouns and gerunds. If you stripped them all out, this novel would lose eight percent of its body weight. “We must always be on guard against mediocre cussing in our writing,” the novelist Katherine Dunn wrote, in a small book called “On Cussing.” There’s nothing middling about the swearing here. This novel rates at least a 6.9 on the Irvine Welsh scale.There’s an overemotional side to “Night Boat to Tangier,” and Barry sometimes lays it on fairly…

[ “I love watching my children rediscover the books I loved. Anything by Louise Fitzhugh was a must for my sister and me,” Jacqueline Woodson said in her By the Book interview. ]No one in Iris’s family, or Aubrey’s — Iris included — is trying to hurt anyone. Sturdy, lasting love, consideration and everyday kindness: These are as integral to a good life as they are challenging to portray in fiction. Villains can be so much easier to bring to fictional life, and, often, the more evil, the more compelling:…