The Escape Artist Who Couldn’t Escape Halloween

From the desk of Rupaliparda

Some deaths are so theatrical they refuse to leave the marquee. Harry Houdini — the greatest escape artist who ever lived, the man who slipped out of handcuffs and sealed tanks while the world held its breath — died a hundred years ago this Halloween, aged just fifty-two. And Emmy-winning CBS News Sunday Morning has claimed the anniversary for its cover story, sending correspondent David Pogue into the mystery that still shadows Houdini’s final act. The irony is exquisite: this was the showman who spent his last years tearing the masks off fake mystics and fraudulent séances, only for death to ambush him on the spookiest night of the calendar. The debunker of the afterlife, now its most famous resident. He would have applauded the timing. Showmanship, dear readers, has no passport.

From haunted mortality to haunted walls. Conor Knighton explores “ghost signs” — faded painted advertisements still clinging to brick and plaster, hawking products for businesses long dead. Marketing expert Ronald Ladouceur traces their origins, while artist Craig Winslow is literally resurrecting them. There is something tender about an advertisement outliving its advertiser.

Then, the human cost of war. David Martin sits with director Peter Berg — the man behind Friday Night Lights — to discuss Netflix’s The Mosquito Bowl, the true story of All-American football stars who traded stadiums for the Marines after Pearl Harbor and fought in the Battle of Okinawa, the last and costliest Pacific battle of World War II. Young men built for glory, spent like currency.

But the crown this week belongs to Parker Posey. The “Queen of the Indies” who ruled the 1990s with Party Girl is enjoying a royal second act — an Emmy nomination for The White Lotus, and now Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Better still, her interviewer is Mo Rocca, her summer theater school classmate, so expect warmth, mischief and decades of shared history. She speaks of a Southern upbringing and the parents who lit her acting fuse.

And a milestone hiding in plain sight: composer Missy Mazzoli is the first woman ever to have an opera premiered by the Metropolitan Opera. Her Lincoln in the Bardo, written with librettist Royce Vavrek, adapts George Saunders’ celebrated novel — Abraham Lincoln mourning his eleven-year-old son Willie, a boy lingering at the threshold between the living and the dead. Faith Salie discovers how punk rock and MTV forged an opera composer. Rebellion, it seems, wears evening gloves too.

Also queued: Seth Doane meets the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London, keeper of birds whose departure, legend warns, would crumble the monarchy itself. David Sedaris offers his commentary; nature visits Utah’s hoodoos; Matt Gutman reports on Israel’s elections from Tel Aviv; the Almanac rewinds to October 25; “Passage” honours notable figures lost this week; and a marathon of prison stories awaits on YouTube.

Sunday Morning airs Sundays at 9:00 a.m. ET on CBS, hosted by Jane Pauley, with executive producer Rand Morrison, and streams on the CBS News app from 11:00 a.m. ET — full episodes on Paramount+ and CBSNews.com. Set your alarms. The trumpet waits for no one.