Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Scoop on Looper

Rian Johnson's critically acclaimed Looper, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as young and old versions of the same time-traveling assassin, asks the question: If you owned a newly invented time machine in 2074, what would you do with it? Drop all those wacky ideas of making a ...

Sir John Gielgud

Google Gaydar

Our era's dominant narrative focuses lavishly on gays, who are portrayed as society's powerless victims. Yet gays themselves don"€™t find the party line very interesting. They like to picture themselves as culturally dominant. For instance, if you spend any time online researching the ...

A Masterful Acting Clinic

The Master, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in a period piece very loosely based on the origins of Scientology, is a sumptuous viewing experience. Yet nobody at the Hollywood ArcLight theater applauded at the end, a sign that it's not likely to live up to the immense hopes that ...

President Obama

How to Pass: Past and Present

Last week, the press whipped itself into a frenzy of anticipation for Barack Obama's big speech at the Democratic Convention, only to have Obama once again turn out to be the National Letdown. That raises the question: What was that whole Obamamania thing about, anyway? Obama's sudden rise from ...

How Robots Push Our Buttons

Robot & Frank is a clever little sci-fi dramedy about a semi-senile old coot whose concerned son buys him a robot as a valet and minder. The film is well crafted and timely because robophobia is once again in fashion. Americans, faced with a rapidly growing population, fear robots will arrive ...

President Obama

Dream Job?

The last thing I had expected of Dinesh D’Souza’s first Michael Moore-type political documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, was that it would prove one of August’s aesthetic marvels. Yet this anti-Obama film’s sumptuous digital cinematography"€”featuring majestically ...

Breaking Old Ground at Augusta

The Augusta National Golf Club, the only course to host a major championship each year, has invited its first two women members"€”former Secretary of State Condi Rice and Darla Moore, wife of dying financier Richard Rainwater. Granted, it’s August, and the hurdle for making the headlines ...

Ratjen

The Last Hurdle in Sports

I turned on the TV and saw a new reality show with an intriguing premise: How big of a head start does a white woman need to outrun a black man? While skinny women frantically raced toward the finish line, a muscular black youth sportingly spotted them a 30-meter lead, then accelerated effortlessly ...

My Olympic Freestyle 100-Meter Q&A

For fifteen years, I"€™ve been writing long analyses of how the data found in Olympic results can help us answer fundamental questions about nature v. nurture, human biodiversity, race, and sex (e.g., 1997, 2000, 2000, 2004, and 2008). This time I"€™m going to answer random questions about the ...

Pablo Picasso

Can Evolution Account for Art?

In this Darwinian age, it has become popular for thinkers to try to dream up the evolutionary mechanisms behind vast, fuzzy phenomena such as art. I don"€™t have a particularly strong opinion on whether natural selection can account for the arts (other than for the one field I know best, golf ...