Revenge of the Identical Twins

Due to Polish president Lech Kaczyński's death in the tragic April 10 plane crash, his identical twin brother Jarosław, Poland's brooding former prime minister, announced on April 26 that he is running to replace his twin. This kind of heartwarming/unsettling vibe is common with stories ...

Polanski’s Ghost Writer, and Americanising Britain

American culture has become so globally dominant that even the lamest U.S. customs, such as our soporific presidential debates, infect countries blessed with superior traditions. For example, as part of the run-up to the May 6th General Election, the Brits are holding their first ever prime ...

Tiger’s Republican Shaming

In professional wrestling, the designated hero in a match is known as the "€œface"€ (short for "€œbabyface"€) and the villain is the "€œheel."€ At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, pro golf suffered a sudden face shortage when Tiger Woods turned “heel.” The ...

Sheer Luck Is All It Takes To Be A Genius

What does it take to be a genius? Europeans of the Romantic Era tended to ascribe the accomplishments of the great to an inborn spark. In contrast, in this age in which voracious competitiveness must rationalize itself in politically correct terms, American self-help books, such as Malcolm ...

Practice Makes Perfect (Or How to Raise a Sports Genius)

In South-Central Los Angeles in 1940, a Mexican immigrant gave her son a 51-cent tennis racket for his 12th birthday. After wandering over to the park and watching how the sport was played, young Pancho Gonzales ventured off on a titanic career that"€”despite never taking a lesson and wasting a ...

Betting on The Hollywood Stock Exchange? Better Play Roulette

I certainly don"€™t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don"€™t bet in the movie box office futures market. Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana ...

Zachary Mason and the Legacy of Borges

In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the ...

The Death of Spectator Sports

What's the long-term future of spectator sports? With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they"€™re the athletic event for people who like watching ...

The Case of the Gay Figure Skater

Imagine that you are a young fellow who likes being the center of attention as you spin around in the air. How would you choose among Olympic sports? The Winter and Summer Games offer events whose varying conceptions of masculinity are so encoded in their apparel that American twelve-year-olds ...

Tarantino vs. The Coen Brothers

The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you"€™ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings: —The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the ...