Rembrandt never left the Netherlands in his life, but the recent Rembrandt in Amsterdam exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada still managed to obsess, in the style of our times, over slavery, colonialism, and racism. The Ottawa museum announced, with a straight face: The Dutch Republic of ...

Evidence continues to pile up that the twin historic disasters of 2020—the dreaded Covid pandemic and the celebrated racial reckoning—have left Americans crazier and lazier. Last week, I reported that my tabulation of year-end homicide counts from 44 of the 50 biggest cities found that ...

Rather than wait around for the FBI and CDC to finally announce next autumn the number of murders in the year just ended, my New Year’s tradition has become to count them up myself. This is feasible because many newspapers run a standard article between Christmas and early January in which a ...

There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be than that virtually every review of the sequel The Matrix Resurrections refers to the auteurs of the 1999 science-fiction ...

It wasn’t a good autumn for Joe Biden and the Democrats. The president’s approval rating was down to a Trump-like 41 percent in an NPR poll released on Monday. Why? British prime minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied to a question about what is the most important influence on his term ...

Like The Great Gatsby, the enduring fame of West Side Story is due to two factors: Many people encounter it during high school (because teachers show the 1961 movie when trying to get kids to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), and it’s really good. Developed for Broadway in 1957 by four gay ...

With mass shootings (such as the high school massacre in Oxford, Mich.) soaring and mass murders (such as the murder-by-car at the Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wis.) back in the headlines, a new study by two Northeastern U. criminologists sheds needed light on this often confused set of ...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed Licorice Pizza is his response to Quentin Tarantino’s similarly nostalgic Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. As you may recall, I was a huge homer for Tarantino’s 2019 movie set in the Hollywood Hills and the adjoining suburban San Fernando Valley in ...

This past week’s events in Wisconsin’s Kenosha and Waukesha offer useful perspectives on a recent clash between pundits Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark over the accuracy of the news media. Sullivan argues that the press makes numerous errors, while Last suggests that they ...

How did Shakespeare use the word “race”? During the current Great Awokening, the Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries has increasingly come under attack, both on general principles (Who needs reason when you have Lived Experience?) and for taking a scientific interest in race. To ...