When writer-director Spike Jonze won a Best Screenplay Golden Globe this week for Her, his little science-fiction fable about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his Siri-like smartphone (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), he apologized for his acceptance speech by noting, "I’m bad at ...
In 2002, on the tenth anniversary of the Rodney King riots, I drove down to the intersection of Florence and Normandie in South-Central LA where all hell had broken loose. To see if the locals were suffering from a “food desert,” I stopped at a nearby supermarket. Yet the main ...
As 2014 dawns, the world continues to keep me furnished with material. For example, the current political shakeup in Turkey turns out to be a mashup of various obsessions and hobbyhorses of mine, such as byzantine conspiracy theories, test prep, the naiveté of American education reform, ...
During the Vietnam War, a famous protest bumper sticker read: It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. But these days, spending on quick fixes for education is approaching levels similar to the ...
One of the more striking evolutions of recent decades has been the stealth revival of the ancient concept of hereditary guilt. It’s seldom called that"terms such as “white privilege” and “structural racism” are more popular"but if you’ve been paying ...
With the release of new PISA test scores for 65 countries’ 15-year-olds this week, it’s worth taking a look at TIME reporter Amanda Ripley’s latest book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got that Way. Ripley came up with the clever idea of following three American ...
When a movie enjoys a $153-million opening weekend, you might think the writer-director would be the toast of the town. Yet even while Gary Ross’s 2012 hit The Hunger Games, a dystopian tale of provincial revolt against the corrupt Capitol, was still doing boffo box office, Lionsgate replaced ...
Will Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s modest masterpiece starring 77-year-old Bruce Dern as a taciturn ex-mechanic who stares like a senile prairie dog, somehow edge out frontrunner 12 Years a Slave for the Best Picture Oscar? If it does, we’ll never hear the end of it. How often since ...
12 Years a Slave"a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853"is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar. Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay ...
If a runaway trolley were about to smash into a bus containing 100 trapped members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, would you push a wholly innocent man named Chip Ellsworth III onto the tracks to stop the accident? What if the bus held 100 members of the New York Philharmonic and the guilt-free ...
