Last week Nir Rosen was disgraced, sacked from his academic post at NYU and forced to make groveling apologies for suggesting, among other things, that reports of the sexual assault on the CBS News reporter Lara Logan which was the subject of my last post would make her into a celebrity. That Mr Rosen thought her…
It tells you all you need to know about American politics today that the story of Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Cairo has generated any whiff of controversy, let alone the amount of it that has been generated. As Amanda Marcotte in today’s Guardian puts it, “there’s no such thing as a sex crime too brutal…
An absorbing if not-very-happy study of happiness — and unhappiness — among the English middle classes
As a lifelong adherent of what liberals (quoting John Stuart Mill on the 19th century British Tories) like to call “The Stupid Party,” I have a natural aversion to calling into question the intelligence of those I disagree with. But sometimes such forbearance is a sore trial to one’s patience. Take today’s Washington Post column…
Yet another Hollywood attempt to bring the good old rom-com up to date. Who knew that it would prove so difficult?
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, James Bernard Murphy of Dartmouth College took a somewhat novel line against the controversy which has recently arisen over Amy Chua and the “Tiger Mother” she has held up for our admiration. What Ms. Chua and her critics agree on is that childhood is all about preparation for adulthood. Ms. Chua…
The “Style” section of today’s Washington Post headlines a story by Bradley Graham about a former Secretary of Defense’s newly-published autobiography, Known and Unknown, thus: “Rumsfeld remains largely unapologetic in memoir.” It would be interesting to do a count of the memoirs of political figures over the years to find how many in the history of…
A moving portrayal of a little-known passage of recent history which even manages to make us forget why it was, until now, little known
Here’s what Frank Rich had to say in yesterday’s New York Times about Michelle Bachmann’s televised reply to the President’s State of the Union address” last Tuesday. “For all the Republican male establishment’s harrumphing, it couldn’t derail her plan to hijack the party’s designated State of the Union response with one of her own.” In fact,…
On the debasement of the language of criticism — From The New Criterion of January, 2011
An exciting and visually impressive cinematic excursion into the ballet which ultimately fails to break free of the shackles of irony.
