After Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael lectured: I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them. Kael's Conundrum has muddled much ...
Perhaps to celebrate the Battle of Gettysburg's 150th anniversary, liberal Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson announced on June 25th that, in effect, it's too bad Pickett's Charge of July 3, 1863 failed. From Meyerson's "Start the border fence in Norfolk, Va.": Until that day, ...
In America's fifth year of having a black president, the five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices had an opportunity on Monday to abolish racial and ethnic preferences for violating the 14th Amendment's requirement of "the equal protection of the laws." But they were unable to pull ...
Watching the news of protests in Istanbul, I"m reminded of the time I required a Turkish private detective's services. I was in Turkey and had to get the answer to an important personal question. I had tried all the proper channels, spending many fruitless hours on the phone with very nice ...
Edward Snowden’s leaks about the spying capabilities of the US government and Silicon Valley have ignited speculation about what the emerging “surveillance society” portends. Still, we’ve long endured many varieties of spying and tracking, and some lessons can be learned ...
Recent incidents of Muslims behaving badly"such as the butchering of British soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic-convert African immigrants, the riots in Stockholm, and the never-ending revelations about numerous Pakistani pimps “grooming” very young white English girls for being ...
The golden age of television sitcoms petered out in the late 1990s when NBC couldn"t convince Jerry Seinfeld to come back for one more season despite offering him a salary of $110 million. (His three costars would have been paid a total of $66 million.) Similarly, as the salaries of the cast ...
Ever since Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the D-Day landings in northern France have increasingly come to stand in for all of the American experience in World War II. That’s understandable but unfortunate because it’s hard to grasp postwar America without examining the ...
The social sciences are supposed to help us make better decisions about the future, not to slather us in ...
With Iron Man 3 hauling in $174 million at the box office last weekend, this is a good time to pay tribute to a great architect whose hold on the American imagination is finally getting the respect it deserves: John Lautner. No matter where they’re filmed or when they’re set, the Iron ...
