Life During Wartime
Sensationalism that somehow manages to be almost without sensation. Who watches such stuff? Oh, wait. Nobody!
Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
This hagiography of a pornographer is a perfect summing up of the culture of Hollywood today
Entry from August 16, 2010
A month ago in this space, I wrote about the fate of sloganeering in politics since the days of the New Deal and the Fair Deal and the New Frontier, arguing that modern advertising techniques in politics as elsewhere favor the content-free “image” over merely content-minimal slogans, which only generate controversy and court contradiction. Rhetoric is…
Entry from August 11, 2010
“Thomas L. Friedman is off today,” according to a note at the bottom of Maureen Dowd’s column in today’s New York Times. With the increasingly irresistible urge to talk back to the media stirring inside me I want to add that Thomas L. Friedman is off every day, whether or not his column is appearing in…
Entry from August 5, 2010
On the same day that The New York Times reports on, analyses and strongly editorializes (“Marriage Is a Constitutional Right”) in favor of a U.S. district judge’s decision that a democratically-passed (state) constitutional amendment in favor of traditional marriage is (federally) unconstitutional, the paper is also running an op ed column by one Amy Greene, a novelist,…
Entry from August 4, 2010
This summer I have been presenting, on behalf of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Hudson Institute in Washington, a series of six films on the general theme of “The Pursuit of Happiness.” The sixth and final film in the series, itself titled The Pursuit of Happyness [sic], by Gabriele Muccino and starring…
Pursuit of Happyness, The
[See “Entry from August 4, 2010” under “My Diary”]
Entry from July 31, 2010
In today’s New York Times, Gail Collins laments that “the dissolution of the boundary between entertainment and politics is old news. Now we’re dissolving the boundary between reality and entertainment.” And then, perhaps reflecting that the dissolution of the boundary — always assuming that boundaries, being imaginary lines, are the kind of things that can be…
Entry from July 29, 2010
The day before the Afghanistan War Logs were made public by Wikileaks in The New York Times (along with The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany), the Times’s Sunday Magazine ran an essay by Walter Kirn in the series “The Way We Live Now” titled “The Art of the Deal as Entertainment.” In it,…
Entry from July 28, 2010
This summer I am presenting on behalf of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Hudson Institute in Washington a series of six films on the general theme of “The Pursuit of Happiness.” The films are being shown at the Hudson Institute, 1015 15th Street N.W., Suite 600, and you can go to the…