Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider ...

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the first of her three terms as Britain’s prime minister. By 2012, however, no American woman has yet reached the presidency. The only woman to make a serious run was considered presidential timber mostly by having been First Lady. Why are women still ...

The more popular it is to worry over some organized threat, the less of a danger it likely is in reality. After all, if some group or institution was truly fearsome, most people would either be terrified into silence or admiration. For example, Dan Brown made a fortune off his The Da Vinci Code ...

There wouldn’t seem to be much left to say about the late Christopher Hitchens after the countless tributes paid by other journalists about the night (or afternoon or morning) they got drunk with Hitch. Still, I want to call admiring attention to his taste in English literature. Unable to ...

One of 2011’s hottest trends is middle-aged pundits announcing that compared to the good old days when they were spry, nothing much is changing anymore. Or at least nothing worth noticing.  Economist Tyler Cowen kick-started this fad of bemoaning stasis by publishing one of those newfangled ...

The movie industry’s clean little secret is that it could be even more vastly profitable if only the participants were as mercenary as they enjoy claiming they are in their self-satirizations. Instead, they are so selflessly generous they think it reasonable to hand $170 million to Martin ...

The Descendants, with George Clooney as a Hawaiian land dynasty’s 1/32nd-Polynesian scion, has fans asking where writer-director Alexander Payne has been since 2004’s Sideways, which dispatched Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on one last trip to the Santa Ynez wine country. (Sideways ...

Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the Washington bureaucrat who ran the FBI and its predecessor from 1924 to his death in early 1972, provides an intriguing data point for tracking the 21st-century struggle between blacks and gays for the upper hand in the Victim ...

Six years ago, Eddie Murphy proposed taking Ocean’s Eleven and inverting it. An all-black cast would play Trump Tower servants who join forces to steal tens of millions from their overbearing boss. And rather than be ace criminals, they’d be bumbling, law-abiding citizens who have to ...

Writers traditionally bemoan how the movie industry fails to appreciate them. Yet there are more films about writers than there is demand from the paying public for motion pictures about individuals whose jobs involve sitting still and, every so often, scratching themselves. For instance, this week ...