There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be than that virtually every review of the sequel The Matrix Resurrections refers to the auteurs of the 1999 science-fiction ...
It wasn’t a good autumn for Joe Biden and the Democrats. The president’s approval rating was down to a Trump-like 41 percent in an NPR poll released on Monday. Why? British prime minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied to a question about what is the most important influence on his term ...
Like The Great Gatsby, the enduring fame of West Side Story is due to two factors: Many people encounter it during high school (because teachers show the 1961 movie when trying to get kids to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), and it’s really good. Developed for Broadway in 1957 by four gay ...
With mass shootings (such as the high school massacre in Oxford, Mich.) soaring and mass murders (such as the murder-by-car at the Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wis.) back in the headlines, a new study by two Northeastern U. criminologists sheds needed light on this often confused set of ...
Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed Licorice Pizza is his response to Quentin Tarantino’s similarly nostalgic Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. As you may recall, I was a huge homer for Tarantino’s 2019 movie set in the Hollywood Hills and the adjoining suburban San Fernando Valley in ...
This past week’s events in Wisconsin’s Kenosha and Waukesha offer useful perspectives on a recent clash between pundits Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark over the accuracy of the news media. Sullivan argues that the press makes numerous errors, while Last suggests that they ...
How did Shakespeare use the word “race”? During the current Great Awokening, the Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries has increasingly come under attack, both on general principles (Who needs reason when you have Lived Experience?) and for taking a scientific interest in race. To ...
A seldom-explained problem slowing the Democrats’ march to a permanent one-party state is that while their electoral grand strategy is impressively opportunistic, sleazy, and dangerous to the country, Democrats don’t like to think of themselves as the cunning bad guys. Therefore, they blow ...
With the CDC estimating last month that drug overdose deaths rose over 30 percent in the first twelve months of the pandemic to nearly 100,000, Sam Quinones’ outstanding new sequel to his award-winning 2015 book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic is definitely ...
Dune is an extraordinarily impressive (if not utterly enjoyable) adaptation of the first half of the epic 1965 science-fiction novel that George Lucas borrowed heavily from for his boys’ version in Star Wars. The book by Frank Herbert, a GOP speechwriter who sensed early various late-’60s ...
