A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to steamroll along at a remarkable pace, considering how, until last November’s election, diversity seemed almost universally ...
Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18. Ron Shelton, director of the baseball movie Bull Durham, played five years of minor-league ball. Richard Linklater pitched in ...
A fundamental problem with nationalism is that it tends to pit natural nationalists against each other in stupid spats, when they’d be better off forming loose coalitions against globalists. For example, aggressive American nationalism, such as Trump’s talk about “annexing” Canada as the ...
One of the more curious aspects of the second Trump administration is how, without warning to voters, the White House has suddenly become more pugnacious than James K. Polk at threatening wars of conquest in the frozen north. As Donald Trump recently ominously observed: We need Greenland for ...
With his new science-fiction satire Mickey 17, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is back with his first movie since he swept the Academy Awards for 2019 with his lucid-looking class-conflict film Parasite. Granted, nobody writing in English has yet put forward a convincing explanation of what ...
Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they ...
With the left depressed in 2025, much of the cultural energy belongs to the right. But where’s it going to go? One increasing possibility appears to be that newly self-confident right-wingers are getting into various kinds of New Age woo-woo, the occult, gnosticism, RFK Jr. junk science, ...
With the 2025 Super Bowl eleven days away, much seems to be going well for the National Football League. For example, the current decline of wokeness reduces the concern aroused during the Colin Kaepernick era that this inherently conservative game would self-destruct over race. The NFL remains ...
I’m writing on Monday night, so when you read this, you’ll know more than I did about how badly the Los Angeles fires flared back up during Tuesday’s forecasted windstorm. The coming annihilation of Los Angeles has been a persistently popular topic over the past century, which has once again ...
