Revanche
A well-made and emotionally satisfying study in elemental human passions that is splendidly down-to-earth — in more ways than one
Entry from June 4, 2009
Joining Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, the similarly named Brent Baker of the Media Research Center has been pointing to the disparity between the media hubbub surrounding the murder of Dr George Tiller and the virtual silence about the murder of an army recruiter in Arkansas. While waves of self-appointed pro-choice spokespersons took to…
Entry from June 2, 2009
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Robert Samuelson had this to say about the media’s relationship to the Obama administration: The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is…
Entry from May 31, 2009
In the last week we have had from The New Republic not one, not two but three strongly-worded articles purportedly arguing the case for gay marriage. Or rather, arguing the case against the case against gay marriage. That is of course no surprise, as the magazine has been an advocate for giving homosexuals the right…
Escaping Ideology
More news from Lionel Trilling’s “bloody crossroads” of literature, or art, and politics — From The American Spectator of May, 2009
Superfluous Kings for Messengers
Fashionistas take note: in the media, death is the new comedy, and canine credulity the new cynicism — From The New Criterion of May, 2009
Entry from May 27, 2009
In all the controversy over President Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I have not yet seen it remembered that “empathy,” the prime qualification for high judicial appointments for both the President and his nominee, is a term from art history. Originally Einfühlung, it was a word invented by German aestheticians in…
“John Had Nothing But Friends”
A biography of John Cheever as much for the voyeur as for the lover of his fiction — From The Washington Times of May 25, 2009
Entry from May 21, 2009
Newspapers are in trouble. Maybe you’ve noticed. In fact, if you read a newspaper, you’re almost bound to have noticed, since they themselves go on and on about their plight and what a disaster for the country it will be when there are no dead-tree media. Oddly, though TV news has had a comparably catastrophic…
Entry from May 18, 2009
Notwithstanding a terse little notice on today’s New York Times’s website that, in yesterday’s column, she “failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo,” I would not be too quick to call Maureen Dowd a plagiarist — even if it turns out to be true…
