War Horse
A children’s movie for those of any age who are content to dwell forever in the complacency of immaturity
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
A handsome reproduction of 1970s-era Britain but with a distinctly contemporary revulsion against Cold War style espionage and its practitioners
Entry from January 8, 2012
The Iowa caucus results should serve as a reminder of one of the things, and perhaps the most consequential, that President Obama has been wrong about, which is American exceptionalism. And one of the most exceptional things about America is that, unlike most of the post-Christian world, we still have a religious right, as the…
Scandals Ad Absurdum
Political struggle gives way in the media and, increasingly, in politics itself to struggle for the possession of reality — From The New Criterion of December, 2011
Behind the Headlines
Spies, hippies, Warholian irony and the fantasy worlds of the popular culture — From The American Spectator of December, 2011-January, 2012
Dangerous Method, A
Serious scientific history provides a great excuse for watching sado-masochistic sex
Entry from December 21, 2011
Unlike P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal Gussie Fink-Nottle, I am not a Newt-fancier, but I feel about Newton Leroy Gingrich rather as I used to feel about Sarah Palin: the more he is hated — by his own side as much as by the opposition — the more I am inclined to like him. Even if I…
Believing is Seeing
A review of The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt by Mary Ann Glendon — From The Weekly Standard of December 19, 2011
Entry from December 16, 2011
In honor of Christopher Hitchens, who died yesterday, I here reproduce my review, published in Crisis Magazine in 2002, of his book, Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books), which I still think is at least as revealing of the man he was as anything he ever wrote and more revealing than his celebrity memoir,…
Entry from December 13, 2011
Why do we continue to suffer with so little objection the continual tide of Hollywood rubbish keeps washing onto our shores? Maybe it’s because we have lost the ability to tell good from bad. Here’s an example from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal where L. Gordon Crovitz writes a column in praise of the movie Margin Call,…
Entry from December 7, 2011
Writing in The New York Times last week, Brian Stelter claimed that “whatever the long-term effects of the Occupy movement, protesters have succeeded in implanting ‘We are the 99 percent’. . . into the cultural and political lexicon.” He knows this because Judith Stein, history professor at the City University of New York told him so….