The Big Short, a comedy starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt as finance-industry renegades betting against the Housing Bubble in 2005"08, is another in the rather improbable new genre of nonfiction feature films that display the business world with more complexity ...
French history is currently speeding up, which ought to be of intense interest to American Republicans pondering whom to nominate in 2016. While many Americans enjoy engaging in lowbrow derision of France, the French traditionally value displays of intelligence, and thus are often the first to work ...
That human beings are somewhat territorial animals is a concept that has gone out of intellectual fashion, but it offers useful insights into much of what is in the news. For example, the ongoing Black Autumn protests on college campuses are in part an outgrowth of the near-universal demand for ...
In the spirit of Aristotelian moderation, allow me to suggest that an emerging danger of the 21st century is that the non-Western world could get overly right-wing. Ironically, a major cause would be that white Western liberals are focusing all of their firepower"using as cat's paws flagrantly ...
Last week, America's institutions of higher learning were in turmoil over Halloween costumes. How can minority students survive Yale if their diktats are ever subjected to skepticism from grown-ups? This week, we are told to not get too excited over 129 people being slaughtered in the streets, ...
On Monday, America's undergraduate college system melted down in three humiliating incidents. At Yale, in a brouhaha over Halloween costumes that has been dragging on for a week and a half now, a distinguished professor apologized for defending freedom of speech and thereby triggering a black ...
My old friend Raymond Wolters, a professor of history at the U. of Delaware for 50 years, has come back from five months in the hospital waiting for his lung transplant to write the first narrative account to make sense of the fads and fashions that have roiled K"12 public schools since the ...
Reactionary author Michel Houellebecq's novel about an Islamic takeover of France, Submission, was published the day of the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo. In fact, the satirical publication's cover that bloody morning was a cartoon of the notoriously decrepit-looking Houellebecq prophesying, "In ...
Almost three years ago, the Academy Awards gave the Best Picture Oscar to Ben Affleck's Iranian hostage drama Argo to encourage making more medium-budget movies for grown-ups. Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg's Cold War film about the negotiations to exchange Soviet spymaster Rudolf Abel for ...
Steve Jobs, the superbly theatrical film about the Apple cofounder's turbulent mid-career arc, opened in Los Angeles and New York over the weekend to the best per-theater grosses since American Sniper. It looks as if it will be another upmarket hit for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in the tradition of ...
