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 ...

A seldom-explained problem slowing the Democrats’ march to a permanent one-party state is that while their electoral grand strategy is impressively opportunistic, sleazy, and dangerous to the country, Democrats don’t like to think of themselves as the cunning bad guys. Therefore, they blow ...

With the CDC estimating last month that drug overdose deaths rose over 30 percent in the first twelve months of the pandemic to nearly 100,000, Sam Quinones’ outstanding new sequel to his award-winning 2015 book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic is definitely ...

Dune is an extraordinarily impressive (if not utterly enjoyable) adaptation of the first half of the epic 1965 science-fiction novel that George Lucas borrowed heavily from for his boys’ version in Star Wars. The book by Frank Herbert, a GOP speechwriter who sensed early various late-’60s ...

The FDA’s approval in 1990 of cochlear implants that enable some of the deaf to hear set off a political struggle. On one side were the hearing parents of deaf children, who tend to assume that five senses are better than four. On the other were deaf civil rights activists who saw technological ...

This week’s awarding of the (quasi-) Nobel Prize in economics to David Card for, in part, an immigration study that I definitively undermined way back in 2006 raises a nagging question in my mind: As cancel culture gets ever more pervasive, are my better insights tending, perversely, to dumb down ...