The Coen brothers’ eighteenth movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their whitest yet, despite Mrs. Joel Coen, Frances McDormand, having devoted her Best Actress speech at last March’s Oscars to demanding “inclusion.” Since Blood Simple in 1984, Joel and Ethan Coen have never ...
Bohemian Rhapsody is a crowd-pleasing biopic about the life and sadly early death of Queen’s singer Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) that subversively depicts the roots of the AIDS epidemic. Rather than portray Mercury in the now-traditional manner—as a martyr to Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s ...
Is First Man, Damien Chazelle’s moody and moving biopic featuring Ryan Gosling as astronaut Neil Armstrong, anti-American for not having a flag in it? Actually, this family drama features a lovely shot of Armstrong’s young son raising the American flag at his school while his father is on ...
One of the more curious books of 2018 is Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age by Donna Zuckerberg. She is the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is America’s leading fan of the Emperor Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire. Dr. Donna, who has a Ph.D. in ...
With the spectacular failure of clinical psychologist Dr. Prof. Christine Blasey Ford’s vague charges against Brett Kavanaugh to elicit any corroborating evidence, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book about the apparent epidemic of politics-related mental illness that began around 2013, ...
Israel is one of the intellectually freer nations, which helps explain how an Israeli political philosopher, Yoram Hazony, has suddenly established himself as perhaps the most interesting thinker of the post–Merkel’s Mistake era with his spectacular new book, The Virtue of Nationalism. With ...
In her new book The Diversity Delusion, Heather Mac Donald takes on identity politics far more forthrightly than Francis Fukuyama dared to in his new book Identity, which I reviewed last week. Just compare their subtitles: Mac Donald chose How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University ...
Do identity politics truly represent “the demand for dignity,” as centrist political philosopher Francis Fukuyama asserts in the subtitle of his new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment? Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of ...
The most overlooked cause of the economic crash of ten years ago this Saturday is modern America’s most sacred value, diversity. As far as I can tell, the now-sacred cliché that “Diversity is our strength” traces back to a spring 1992 speech made by Vice President Dan Quayle about a trip ...
Operation Finale is a decently crafted, reasonably accurate retelling of the kidnapping from Argentina of Adolf Eichmann (played by Sir Ben Kingsley), the most notorious supervisor of the Holocaust still on the loose in 1960, by Israeli Mossad operatives (led by a secret agent portrayed by Oscar ...
