Who says American manufacturing is dead? The nation has cornered the international market on making amends. Apologizing is a thriving industry. Call it Big Sorry. It wasn"t always like this. The "Checkers" speech, with its low-key, almost sunny defiance, is a kinescope relic. Today, ...
I’m notoriously mean-spirited, so please believe me: When I say I think Chris Matthews has a brain tumor, I am trying to be charitable. The MSNBC mouthpiece’s show is called Hardball, but Oddball would be more apropos. Matthews’s flaky on-air comments are a matter of public record, with that ...
Charles Murray is a genius with a bad idea. Murray is an expert on IQ, but while not even he might qualify as a “genius” based on his own criteria, he sure as hell fits mine: Any guy who can write a book such as The Bell Curve and somehow maintain a (more or less) respectable career is a ...
Middle America’s quaint pastimes are mocked. Quirky teens navigate suburbia’s dark, surreal underbelly. Filmmakers make films about filmmaking. Families are weird, the planet is dying, baby boomers are awesome, everyone’s gay, and America sucks. Welcome to the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, ...
At my first and last Brownie meeting, I hid in the community-center bathroom for two hours while the other girls played jumpsies, screeched like pterodactyls, and did other scary stuff. From that night on, I pegged the Girl Scouts as an inconsequential holding pen for dimwitted, extroverted sheep ...
“Ugly.” That’s how not one, not two, but three professional media-watchers headlined their stories about a recent press panel promoting the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls. What horrors took place at last week’s Television Critics Association confab, then? Chuck Lorre sucker-punched Anthony ...
I occasionally visit The Comic’s Comic to keep up with the thimbleful of contemporary comedians I don’t find unfunny or politically indigestible or both. Right after Boxing Day, the editors announced the suicide of Joe Bodolai, a former SNL writer who’d been found dead in a Los Angeles hotel ...
I come bearing great tidings to the women of the world: You no longer have any problems. Genital mutilation has been wiped out, rape is a thing of the past, and the price of chocolate has dropped to record lows. That’s the only conclusion I can reach when confronted with the feminist crisis de la ...
As a sentient being born in the 1960s, I don’t remember not knowing about the Holocaust. So only two things genuinely shocked me when I visited Israel’s Yad Vashem last year: First, the Garden of the Righteous Gentiles wasn’t quite the lush oasis I’d been expecting. It was more like a row ...
I was the shortest child in every grade, cursed with crooked teeth, thick glasses, and a permanent frown. Yet despite (or because of) my “Wednesday Addams” mien, I was never bullied. Except for once. My first week of high school, some older girls stomped around the cafeteria at lunchtime, ...
