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 ...
Americans can learn much from Israel. It’s an increasingly prosperous nation that grapples manfully with its problems. For example, when the Israelis put up a fence along the border to keep out illegal aliens (or “illegal infiltrators,” as the Israeli government calls them), they ...
Over the last few days, as I watched both the homicidal antics of the Boston Bomb Brothers and the characteristically competent Tom Cruise science-fiction movie Oblivion, I was reminded that one of the least expected developments of my lifetime has been how the vast majority of the world’s ...
Covert agendas play a sizable role in the gun-control debate. If you were to pay attention solely to the handful of homicide cases the press emphasizes, you would assume that the country's biggest problem is white males committing mass shootings. Yet the total death toll from all mass shootings in ...
In 1999, I was interrogated on suspicion of being an Irish Republican Army terrorist plotting to assassinate Baroness Margaret Thatcher with a letter bomb. I was startled by a phone call from the police chief of the Maryland town where the former prime minister was going to attend a conference ...
With gun control, murder, and race much in the news, it's worth noting that the Obama Administration has solved its longstanding problem that, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit the majority of homicides in the US. For years, the press has been explaining that ...
What do people really mean by the word “vibrant?” Until the disco era, “vibrant” was used only rarely, mostly in connection with vibrations, literal or metaphorical. A quick search online finds no examples of “vibrant” in the works of George Orwell or John ...
