If it’s OK for Wanda Sykes to relish the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s death, then is it also OK for me to relish the thought of Nancy Pelosi’s discomfiture over (gulp) what she knew and when she knew it on the subject of water-boarding? Can I rub my hands with glee at the prospect of…
Yet another sob-story about the growing unpopularity of the mainstream media that doesn’t exactly tug at the heart-strings of at least one media critic
Something’s up, you’ve got to think, when we start getting lectures from journalists on discretion. Yesterday, in the London Daily Telegraph, Mary Kenny was praising Mick Jagger’s ex-wife for returning the £500,000 advance for her supposedly tell-all memoir that didn’t, after all, tell all. Or enough. “Admirers of the Texan magnolia will be gratified that…
Another movie celebration of media narcissism, and an evocation of pathos for the long recessional of the newspaper business’s terminal decline
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the final lines of Philip Larkin’s poem, “Homage to a Government,” written about the “retreat from empire” under the British Labour government of the 1960s: Next year we shall be living in a countryThat brought its soldiers home for lack of money.The statues will be standing in…
David Brooks in today’s New York Times may or may not be right about the need for the Republican party to re-think not only its policies but its favorite myths and its iconography. But the example he holds up for the party’s emulation is misconceived: Republicans generally like Westerns [he writes]. They generally admire John Wayne-style…
One of my three favorite stories from yesterday’s papers was the one in the (London) Daily Telegraph about how Kate Winslet, in an interview with Marie Claire magazine, is all in a huff about being thought of as middle-class. Not that anyone has actually called her middle-class, at least not since she was a teenager at…
Is the culture of no culture also a culture? — From The American Spectator of April, 2009
On the obligations owed to those whom we only know as media images — From The New Criterion of April, 2009
Over the weekend, John Kass of The Chicato Tribune made what you might think would be the obvious point that, in releasing the “torture” memos and then suggesting that prosecutions of Bush administration officials might result from them, President Obama made a mistake which must have endangered the flow of intelligence about future terrorist activity that…
Another sensitive British evocation of childhood with a brilliant child actor — but one whose focus keeps shifting to the old folks
We all know that today’s culture presents us with an ever-growing list of things which, for ideological reasons, we are well-advised to regard as a priori truths: as, for instance, that belief in a divine creation is anti-scientific; that there are no racially-based differences in intelligence or any other native ability; or that there is…
