A fascinating test case of the rule of law in America is whether or not law schools are obeying the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision in the summer of 2023 finding affirmative action in undergraduate admissions to be a violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise of “equal ...
A fascinating recent example of what I call cops retreating to the doughnut shop began in July 2023 when the New Jersey State Police largely stopped issuing traffic tickets for six to eight months after being accused once again of racial profiling, with the result that, surprise, surprise, car ...
Sir Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus has been one of the more unexpectedly culturally influential films of the 21st century. Americans had thought endlessly about Ancient Rome until the later 20th century, as my recent visit to Washington, D.C., pointed ...
Your opinion of the hit movie Wicked: Part 1, a 160-minute extrapolation of the 90-minute opening act of the Broadway musical Wicked, depends upon your answer to the question: When it comes to Wicked, can there be too much of a good thing? Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the freshman ...
Men like thinking about the Roman Empire. So, should Sir Ridley Scott have cast Denzel Washington as the bisexual bad guy in his new movie Gladiator II? Is it historically accurate to cast a black villain in the Roman Empire? Conversely, should New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art be hosting ...
This is the time when every pundit explains that Kamala Harris lost due to this thing he saw coming first. So, now’s my turn. Before explaining how I was right all along, let me admit: not that I predicted Trump’s victory. Nor did I forecast that Harris would win either. As usual, I didn’t ...
I almost never bother to try to forecast the outcome of an election. After all, we shall all know soon enough. High-tech California, for instance, should be done counting its votes by early December. So, rather than attempt to offer insights into the same thing everybody else is talking about, ...
Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film Megalopolis, a screenplay he’d been noodling with since the 1980s? Before answering that question, though, let’s set the ...
One of the funnier aspects of the articles denouncing my recently restored freedom to speak in public, such as The Atlantic’s and now The Guardian’s, is that they can’t think of any good reasons why I should ever have been censored from making public appearances by threats for the entire ...
We may never get to see the nine-hour documentary about Prince that Netflix has paid tens of millions for because the late musician’s estate has legally stymied its release. So, it’s fortunate that The New York Times Magazine has run an enormous article, “The Prince We Never Knew” by Sasha ...
