Who is the real Barack Obama? It's an odd question to ask about an incumbent president less than a week before he's up for reelection. It's an especially strange inquiry to make of a president as self-obsessed and introspectively voluble as Obama. Yet Obama has been the subject of so much ...
No journalist this century has played a more persistent role in forging a new conventional wisdom on education than Paul Tough, long of The New York Times Magazine. Tough has threaded the needle between the inanity of Great Society theorizing and getting himself Watsoned, as happened to DNA pioneer ...
Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs up or thumbs down when you can access the wisdom of crowds by averaging dozens of ratings, whether elite or mass? As a ...
We live in an age, we are often informed, of Big Data. Every facet of life is collected, counted, and analyzed carefully: baseball statistics, Twitter trends, and even Google searches regarding which celebrities are gay. On the other hand, there are all sorts of numbers that we"re not ...
Rian Johnson's critically acclaimed Looper, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as young and old versions of the same time-traveling assassin, asks the question: If you owned a newly invented time machine in 2074, what would you do with it? Drop all those wacky ideas of making a ...
Our era's dominant narrative focuses lavishly on gays, who are portrayed as society's powerless victims. Yet gays themselves don"t find the party line very interesting. They like to picture themselves as culturally dominant. For instance, if you spend any time online researching the ...
The Master, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in a period piece very loosely based on the origins of Scientology, is a sumptuous viewing experience. Yet nobody at the Hollywood ArcLight theater applauded at the end, a sign that it's not likely to live up to the immense hopes that ...
Last week, the press whipped itself into a frenzy of anticipation for Barack Obama's big speech at the Democratic Convention, only to have Obama once again turn out to be the National Letdown. That raises the question: What was that whole Obamamania thing about, anyway? Obama's sudden rise from ...
Robot & Frank is a clever little sci-fi dramedy about a semi-senile old coot whose concerned son buys him a robot as a valet and minder. The film is well crafted and timely because robophobia is once again in fashion. Americans, faced with a rapidly growing population, fear robots will arrive ...
The last thing I had expected of Dinesh D’Souza’s first Michael Moore-type political documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, was that it would prove one of August’s aesthetic marvels. Yet this anti-Obama film’s sumptuous digital cinematography"featuring majestically ...
