The hubbub over last week's election in Israel is another reminder of why the Democrats have pinned all their 2016 hopes on Hillary Clinton. The Democrats are planning a coronation rather than a competitive donnybrook (like the one the Republicans seem to be ginning up) because a genuine battle in ...
With Tuesday's election, Israel is back in the news. I"m writing this Monday night, so I don"t know who has won. And you may not know either because Israeli politics are so carefully calibrated that governments often aren"t formed until after several days of post-election ...
I never paid much attention to the growing BDS movement because I"m not into bondage, domination, and submission. But it turns out that BDS is actually a decade-old Palestinian rights movement that targets Israel for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. These are the same tools that student ...
It has become a press custom to ask Republican presidential hopefuls, such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whether they believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The intention is to trap the politicians between their Biblical literalist supporters and the prestige of Science with a ...
Next Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of American movies as the premier pop cultural force on the planet. On March 3, 1915, director D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, an unprecedented epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction that commemorated the 50th anniversary of Appomattox and ...
The important new book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Los Angeles Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy, is the hybrid of a true crime tale about the struggle of white LAPD detective John Skaggs to find the killer of the son of a black LAPD detective and a taboo-breaking ...
The real estate market is back in the news, although, not surprisingly, it's now the mirror image of last decade's excesses. Ten years ago the prices of exurban tract homes in the sand states of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida reached absurd heights, but everybody figured that these hot ...
With identity politics and their accompanying political correctness in the news (as usual), it's worth considering how similar human urges play out in the world of sports. If Congressional politics is notoriously show biz for the ugly, then identity politics is athletics for the ...
It's widely assumed, both by liberals and conservatives, that the fields of arts and entertainment innately induce egalitarian political leanings. Much of the prestige of the left, in fact, derives from the notion that it's only natural for creative people to favor equality above all ...
Clint Eastwood's Iraq war drama, American Sniper, reminds me that the central frustration of being a film critic is that there isn"t much opportunity to be a tastemaker, because it's pretty obvious to most everybody whether a film works or not. If you have to explain why a movie works, then it ...
