With immigration policy back in the news, I’m reminded that when I was a lad 40 years ago, the cutting-edge wisdom was that rapid population growth was a major problem. (Granted, my parents didn’t let me stay up school nights to watch Johnny Carson, who had Paul Ehrlich, author of the ...
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as a silent-screen legend plotting a comeback and William Holden as her toy boy, remains one of the most famous movies ever. Yet Sunset Boulevard’s origins in an Evelyn Waugh novel have been forgotten. This cultural amnesia is curious ...
A skeleton dug up from a parking lot in Leicester, England last year was confirmed this month to be King Richard III. This provides as good an excuse as any for exploring the now overlooked but always relevant complexities of kinship. The last of the Plantagenets ruled England until his 1485 death ...
A young English teacher at a public high school in New Jersey emails me: I"m just in my third year of teaching, so I get stuck with the remedial classes. I mean, what are you going to do? But the stress of dealing with bad behavior is wearing me down. I ask myself why the old teacher's honors ...
With the Washington establishment agreeing that what America needs right now is to double down on guest workers and amnesty for illegal aliens, it’s worthwhile to notice how a serious country such as Israel deals with past mistakes in immigration policy. In America, we try not to learn from ...
As part of my continuing series on the causes of the 60s, let’s consider Kevin Drum’s revival (”America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead”) in Mother Jones magazine of the recurrent theory that lead poisoning leads to the decline of civilization. When I was young, it was ...
Few disagree with the line from the old Jimmy Buffett song that “If we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane.” Yet in movies, humorless characters are funnier. There’s nothing more painful onscreen than somebody who is supposed to be witty and wise delivering a line that ...
Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Kill Osama thriller Zero Dark Thirty (which goes into national release Friday), has always been the film nerd's dream date: attractive, classy, artistically ambitious, feminine, and fascinated by men who like blowing up stuff. The favorite gal of the Boys Club of ...
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking carnage upon dozens of victims. I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza. You might ...
Mass shootings have been a recognized phenomenon in the US since Charles Whitman went up the tower at the U. of Texas with a rifle in 1966 and entered Baby Boomer lore. That's about as far back as I can remember, so I can"t tell you if these kinds of horrible events happened just as ...
