Anger can be constructive; it can motivate people to fight noble battles and right egregious wrongs. Anger can also be nonconstructive. It can distract people from genuine problems while driving them to unproductive extremes. Nonconstructive anger often starts with a fiction. Like how a false ...
Golem tales always follow the same template: A Jew builds a monster of clay to destroy his enemies, but in the end the golem turns on its creator. In 2019, in a piece that generated unintended national controversy, I wrote about immigrant golems. This week, I’ll examine the homegrown ...
A lesson from my casting director years: An actor’s instincts are more important than talent when it comes to landing a part. At an audition, you have to be able to read the room. If the room is loose and jokey, joke along. If you sit there like a cadaver, you won’t get a callback. Conversely, ...
You people, I swear. For months I’ve been longing to write my magnum opus about the superb 2021 post-Covid Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness and its impact on Sino-U.S. relations. Sure, that column would be of no interest to you, and sure, it would only be one sentence long (“The superb 2021 ...
Thirty-five-year-old Nicole Mokeme was Portland, Maine’s BLM superstar. She founded “Rise and Shine,” a woodsy retreat where “BIPOCs” could gather and rant about whitey. As Mokeme stated on her website, “as the awareness of white terrorism began to rise, black youth suggested the need ...
You’d think saving babies would be enough. Dobbs saved the babies. What more does the right need? “We won; pop the bubbly.” But that’s not how the right’s wired at the moment. Sure, saving babies is great and all, but the MAGA right’s too distracted to appreciate the victory. They’ll ...
Remember the Dhaliwal brothers? No? Good. Like yesterday’s bowel movement, they don’t deserve remembering, let alone an encore. That said, I’m gonna reluctantly invoke them, because even the worst of mankind can offer lessons for the rest of us. Christmas Day 2007, brothers Kulbir (23) ...
You didn’t think you could just walk away from Covid hysteria, did you? You didn’t think it would just end, right? In fact, “Phase II” is about to begin. And I’m not talking about more masks ’n’ jabs. I’m talking about a new iteration, a mutation. Not a viral one, but a ...
California State Senator Steven Bradford (Compton, Watts, Inglewood, and the dead rapper district of Long Beach) is the blackiest black in the state’s Democrat machine. Bradford so black, every time he visits Long Beach port, the vessels get sickle cell. As a legislator, he’s single-mindedly ...
Regarding the Uvalde school shooting, most of us have already cycled through the Seven Stages of Vicarious Grief. That’s the process that follows every mass shooting, when we pick our “why” from the list of seven approved mass shooting causes, and we criticize everybody who picked a different ...
