Mary Novaria

Get the Picture? A Father's Legacy and the Love of Art BY MARY NOVARIA June 17, 2016 Published by The Good Men Project My dad was a first generation Irish-American who grew up playing stickball on the streets of New York. His father, a laborer from County Tyrone, had an 8 th  grade education, never took his family to a museum, and didn’t play classical music in the home. The radio, which was considered a luxury, was for listening to “Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy” and the New York Giants baseball games. My father was in his 30s before going to the top of the Empire State building—he took out-of-town guests—and was well into adulthood before he was exposed to the treasures that lay behind the doors of MoMA or The Met. Click here to continue reading... I'm Not Sally Draper But I Could've Been BY MARY NOVARIA March 27, 2015    Published by the Huffington Post             ...

Addiction has become a spectator sport. I’m not a big fan of that. Our culture’s fascination, make that obsession, with celebrity and notoriety has, perhaps, become an addiction as well, and we want more, more, more. More gossip, more dirt, more photos. As our tech capabilities expand, so do our appetites. Our society’s collective and compulsive hunger requires cannibalistic feeding on the bloody mess our so-called idols and stars have made of their lives. We want this so badly that we turn murder supects into overnight celebrities, devoting hours and days and months of coverage to them--especially if they are young, attractive, white women who are charged with killing their children. We want this so badly that we lap up derogatory and a disrespectful monikers like "Octomom." For some of us, in fact for many of us, journalism was once a noble profession. Right now (thank you so very much News Corp), journalists are in the news, breaking laws in order to break a story. Lurki...