The Makers and the Takers
If only one good thing comes out of the rhetorical cacophony surrounding this year’s election results, I hope it’s this: can we please, as a nation and as a society, reverse the inverted positions of...
View ArticlePirates of the Imagination
I just get such a kick out of the Pirates trilogy (the Gore Verbinski movies; not the fool’s-gold fourth entry that I won’t even see). It’s such an aesthetic triumph; it’s such delightfully arty...
View ArticleThe Message of All Eugene O’Neill
“There is one man — and only one! — who is so old, drunk, ruined, hopeless, self-destructive, sick, failed, and bitter (and yet who yet once had promise and potential to rival anyone whom you wish to...
View ArticleYet Another Reason I Can’t Stand John Updike
Reading Michael Tomasky’s new piece on Obama in the February 7 New York Review of Books, I noticed what I assumed to be a particularly good David Levine caricature of John Boehner — and then I...
View ArticlePopes: Velásquez and Bacon
For obvious reasons I’ve been thinking about Papal authority (moral, philosophical, financial, political and spiritual) in the past few weeks. Andrew Sullivan is among the loudest voices in the chorus...
View ArticleHow Long Ago
It’s strange to realize that you’re old enough to have seen the world change. The idea comes out of nowhere when you don’t expect it and aren’t looking for it but the frisson of recognition is always...
View ArticleWhy Everyone Hates Anne Hathaway
Since the Oscars there have been dozens of articles I’ve noticed links to, and some I’ve skimmed or read, in different kinds of publications, about how “everyone” (or “EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET”)...
View ArticleNot With a Bang
There’s a scene in Stephen King’s 1978 apocalyptic epic The Stand (in the 1990 extended edition, with the wonderful Berni Wrightson drawings and the lamentable Cyndi Lauper references) in which we are...
View ArticleThere is No Moriarty
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was done with Sherlock Holmes, the literary “consulting detective” he had created in 1886, whose appearances in two novels and 23 short stories had made Doyle wealthy and...
View ArticleApparent Retrograde Motion
Rush Limbaugh is easy to dismiss (or rather, to not “take seriously,” since his statements are so exuberant and grandiose — so obviously geared to foment certain primitive emotions in his listeners),...
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