NEW YORK—“I’m spiritual but not religious.” WTF. Why do people say this? Yes, we know you’re spiritual. Everybody is spiritual. Mafia hitmen are spiritual. We’re all made up of body, soul, and spirit. So why are you telling me about it? Or maybe you mean “spiritual” in the sense of ...
NEW YORK—If anybody in the reality TV world remembers Judge Wapner, the original host of The People’s Court, I doubt that they remember what he stood for. He stood for the rule of law. The rule of law above all other considerations. The role of the courtroom was to apply law and nothing else. ...
NEW YORK—Back in the bad old days of the cocaine epidemic, there was a sheriff in Jasper County, Texas, who was visited one morning by four federal agents—two from the FBI and two from the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a courtesy call. They didn’t really need his help. They’d ...
NEW YORK—I think Clarence Thomas made the right decision in the Wild Party House Case before the Supreme Court, but I think maybe my reasons would be different from his reasons. In case you haven’t been hanging out in Northeast D.C. lately, here’s what happened. A couple of people called the ...
NEW YORK—Apparently a whole bunch of CEOs and public officials and celebrities and high sheriffs of various sorts have been writhing around in their mahogany offices, screaming in agony. I speak, of course, of the painful decision. If somebody calls a press conference and starts out, ...
DALLAS—My buddy Don Graham just finished a book on the State Bible of Texas. I speak, of course, of Giant, the 1956 multigenerational epic starring Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor that was based on a book written by an old-maid liberal feminist Jew from New York and brought to the screen by a ...
CHICAGO—For the first couple months after Get Out was released, I was beating the drums for it, telling anyone who would listen that it was brilliant dark-comedy horror with a Rosemary’s Baby vibe combined with a Roger Corman-type social-commentary subtext. The film has a third-act problem, but ...
NEW YORK—I walked down 8th Street yesterday, past the jumble of little secondhand shops and shoe stores and stand-up lunch counters and trendy bodegas, looking for the place where Susan Cabot was discovered. It was a club called the Village Barn—little more than a restaurant with a hillbilly ...
NEW YORK—Every day somebody howls for the shutdown of a website, the squelching of a Twitter account, the nuking of a Facebook page, the removal of a video or a screed or a manifesto, all in the name of…uh…well, it depends, but mostly in the name of saving the world. We’ve become a ...
NEW YORK—Small children on the playground know that if you can’t win an argument any other way, you always play the faulty-research card, as in: “Where did you get your information?” Those six words are always spoken with an air of superiority, implying that your opponent is superstitious, ...
