American culture has become so globally dominant that even the lamest U.S. customs, such as our soporific presidential debates, infect countries blessed with superior traditions. For example, as part of the run-up to the May 6th General Election, the Brits are holding their first ever prime ...
In professional wrestling, the designated hero in a match is known as the "face" (short for "babyface") and the villain is the "heel." At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, pro golf suffered a sudden face shortage when Tiger Woods turned “heel.” The ...
What does it take to be a genius? Europeans of the Romantic Era tended to ascribe the accomplishments of the great to an inborn spark. In contrast, in this age in which voracious competitiveness must rationalize itself in politically correct terms, American self-help books, such as Malcolm ...
In South-Central Los Angeles in 1940, a Mexican immigrant gave her son a 51-cent tennis racket for his 12th birthday. After wandering over to the park and watching how the sport was played, young Pancho Gonzales ventured off on a titanic career that"despite never taking a lesson and wasting a ...
I certainly don"t know much about investing, but I can give you one solid tip: don"t bet in the movie box office futures market. Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expects to get federal regulatory approval to begin trading movie pseudo-shares in April (and a start-up called Veriana ...
In synopsis, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a lapidary first work of fiction by Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason, sounds like an overly clever postmodern literary jest. This elegant collection of very short stories consists of 44 purported pre-Homeric variations on the legends of the ...
What's the long-term future of spectator sports? With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they"re the athletic event for people who like watching ...
Imagine that you are a young fellow who likes being the center of attention as you spin around in the air. How would you choose among Olympic sports? The Winter and Summer Games offer events whose varying conceptions of masculinity are so encoded in their apparel that American twelve-year-olds ...
The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you"ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings: —The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the ...
As you"ve no doubt heard by now, leading Oscar nominees Avatar and The Hurt Locker are directed by ex-spouses: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who were married from 1989-1991. What you might not know is that traces of each can be seen in the other's movie. But first, the question of the ...
