Reader, The
Victim chic claims another victim. Wouldn’t you just know that it would get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture?
Honor Among Bankers
Is there a tell-tale cultural difference between Europe and America when it comes to banker suicides? — From The Weekly Standard of February 9, 2009
Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The
A new Forrest Gump meets Memento, though this is worse than either. Of course it is festooned with Academy Award nominations
Entry from February 3, 2009
I can’t resist this telling juxtaposition. In yesterday’s Washington Post a front page story by Brigid Schulte breathlessly announced a “Fresh Look at Martha Washington: Less First Frump, More Foxy Lady.” Here’s how it begins: This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought. Our image of the mother of…
Entry from January 31, 2009
President Obama as good as told us during the ca mpaign that he thought there was a virtue in talking to our enemies simply for the sake of it — as if it were inconceivable to him that such a proof of good faith could not in itself fail to placate them. They might not…
The Mystification of Change
Our sophisticated political culture seems to have stopped expecting rhetoric to have anything to do with reality — From The New Criterion of January, 2008
Entry from January 29, 2009
What a lot the folks at NPR — among others — are making of President Obama’s promise in his electoral address that “We will restore science to its rightful place.” An interview the other day on “All Things Considered” with Harold Varmus, a Nobel prize-winning doctor who was director of the National Institutes of Health in…
Enemies of the Good
Because goodness, like heroism, is an embarrassment to the post-modern critic, he can only treat it as caricature — From The American Spectator of December, 2008-January, 2009
Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood gives us more of his seemingly endless late-life penance for Dirty Harry when all we want is for Harry to come back
Entry from January 27, 2009
Although he doesn’t say so, Bret Stephens’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Guantánamo Is No Blot on U.S. Honor,” seems to have been written in reply to one by Karen J. Greenberg in Sunday’s Washington Post, which refers to Gitmo as a “shameful episode” and “one of the most shameful passages in [America’s] history” as well…
Entry from January 25, 2009
The election was hardly out of the way before the media started noticing that there might be the odd hitch in prospects for the fulfilment of the new President Obama’s campaign promises. In particular, his promise to close the prison for terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, suddenly came to seem less than a simple matter….