Ann Coulter and Ottawa U: Goodbye College, Hello Madrasah

When Harvard President Larry Summers dared to imply men are better at math and science than women, his students almost fainted, literally. Nancy Hopkins, a biology student at the ...

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 ...

Conan’s Last Laugh

By now, we all know the CW-like drama of Coco, The Chin, and The Peacock. It's hard to think of a time when late night comedy has attracted more attention, and Conan O"€™Brien, ...

Megalomaniac Filmmakers

With James Cameron's Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas's original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings ...

Up in the Air: Reitman, Clooney Disappoint

Until the Underpants Bomber tried to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was widely assumed to be Up in the Air. Indeed, before the ...

The Ballad of Jeff Bridges

After The Dark Knight failed to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the Academy expanded the number of nominees for its top honor from five to ten. With luck, these improved ...

Quibbling Rivalry

Last Sunday evening, while I was watching the final minutes of the now famous Indianapolis Colts - New England Patriots football game, I experienced a moment of middle-aged ...

Death (Metal) of the West

Alright, you win. Reading all these blogs, I can"€™t avoid the subject of fist-pumping Heavy Metal any longer. A metaller since the tender age of 13 (coincidence?), I"€™ve ...

Method in the Madness

Can I milk another column out of Mad Men? Why not? Matthew Weiner's show about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s is so meticulously detailed that it's worth using it as a spur ...

Man Men

Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it's ...

Serial Killers

The cable period drama Mad Men attempts to answer the question: What would have Cary Grant's stylish advertising executive in Hitchcock's 1959 barnburner North by Northwest gotten ...

Hollywood Chihuahuas

Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in "€œSpoon-Fed Cinema"€ ...

White Noise

I was once asked to imagine what the world would look like today had North American settlers snubbed the African slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can let our ...

Stuff White People Like

A Genealogy of Morals One of my fundamental beliefs about culture and humanity is that morals and folkways are subject to natural selection. You need not believe in ...

Everybody’s Racist

Having the moniker “Southern Avenger” is like being named “Malcolm X.” Both have racial connotations and people assume the best or worst depending on their ...

Spies Like Us

Watching Steven Soderbergh's comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer ...


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