Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The
“Age is unnecessary,” as King Lear ruefully noticed, though there is more than one way of disposing of it
Entry from May 16, 2012
Former Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia writes in Politico of the possible impact on this year’s election of the so-called “Bradley effect” — which he says, rather proudly, some have called the “Wilder effect,” since a similar thing happened to him when he ran for governor in 1989. Then, as when Los Angeles Mayor Tom…
Entry from May 7, 2012
Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post has issued a challenge to Messrs Romney and Obama: Give at least one campaign speech, on a substantive policy issue, lasting at least 15 minutes, that does not contain a single factual error or misstatement. That means no sugar-coating of your record, no exaggerated…
Monsieur Lazhar
A moving and beautiful portrait of the natural bond between teacher and pupils that is also a stealth critique of today’s educational orthodoxy
The Echo Chamber
How to be a Nazi made easy: just disagree with Corey Robin — From The New Criterion of April, 2012
Entry from April 29, 2012
For a forthcoming issue of The American Spectator I have been writing about Lena Dunham’s brilliant but painfully funny HBO series “Girls,” whose power to generate buzz on the media’s ever vigilant distaff side is almost more impressive than the series itself. Most fascinating to me has been the way in which female journalists tend…
What nice girls aren’t
Sluts are bad. No! Sluts are good. Wait a minute. I forget which it is. But I’m pretty sure those who think they’re bad are bad. — From The New Criterion of April, 2012
Act of Valor
[See “Honor Bound” in The American Spectator of April, 2012, under “Articles”]
Honor Bound
What are the socially acceptable and unacceptable ways of discovering who we really are these days? — From The American Spectator of April, 2012
Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope
The former satirist Morgan Spurlock makes the mistake of taking on a subject to which he is more sympathetic than he is to McDonald’s, the Bush administration or product placement
Entry from April 23, 2012
Everybody knows the old definition of chutzpah. It’s the guy who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. Well, now we have a new definition, courtesy of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian nut-case who murdered 77 people last summer and is now undergoing a…