Diversity Down Under

May I quote myself, please?  Thank you. The remarkable thing about the Diversity cult is that all the circumstances of the actual human world refute its tenets, wherever we ...

Ben Affleck’s The Town is a Perfectly Executed Heist

The Town, set amidst the fading (but increasingly fashionable) Irish-American underclass of Boston's gentrifying Charlestown neighborhood, is a model of crime genre filmmaking, ...

The Prat Collection in Sydney, Matt & Kim’s Sidewalks, and Jenny Slate’s Marcel

Plus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Ryan in Jack Goes Boating, Jazz at Lincoln Center travels to Cuba, and Oktoberfest takes over Munich Museum of Everything, Exhibition 3, ...

The French Problem

Is this a Jewish joke or a Gypsy joke? What do you get when a Jew and a Gypsy go into business together? A chain of empty stores. About fifteen years ago, a friend of mine ...

The Venice Biennale Gone Evil

Avant-garde is an epidemic.  From modern architecture—an added misfortune, like a hunchback struck down by elephantiasis—there is simply no escape, as its creedal ...

The Great Machete Meta-Joke Fail

After the Euro-ennui of The American last week, Robert Rodriguez's Machete sounded pretty entertaining: heroic illegal immigrants driving bouncing lowrider cars slaughter the evil ...

Stephen Hawking: The Gimp Who Would Be God

As if it were the center of the frickin"€™ universe, celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking's new book The Grand Design rocketed atop the publishing cosmos and reached #1 on Amazon ...

Lee Friedlander Hits The Whitney, Max’s Kansas City Gets Well-Deserved Tribute

Plus, hot springs in Germany, Paris Autumn Festival, and the latest greatest art scene in Beijing Inhotim Cultural Institute, Brazil An idyllic cultural haven located in the ...

Under Siege: On Emma Williams

In October 2000 most of the children invited by Dr. Emma Williams to her son Archie’s seventh birthday party failed to turn up. Distance was not the issue, given that her ...

Get Low: Stellar Cast, Shoddy Screenplay

Get Low, a dramedy starring venerable elders Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Cissy Spacek, is promisingly based on a prime slab of Old, Weird Americana: the true 1938 story of an ...

Catalonia Bullfighting Ban: Purely Political and Totally Impractical

At the end of the film Little Caesar, the gangster Enrico Bandello, played by Edward G. Robinson, is shot down by the police. As he dies in the gutter, he asks, "€œMother of ...

Laura Linney Stars in “€˜The Big C”€™ and a Gainsbourg Biopic Takes Off

Plus, a new book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s torrid love affair, Best Coast’s latest and greatest LP, and non-traditional vacations involving tree ...

10 Things About Turning 40

After 39 years of not being 40, I decided to give it a try. Being two score is unlike anything before it so I feel it would be prudent to warn you about a few things... 1) YOU ...

Farewell, A Vaguely Accurate Portrayal of the Cold War

We won the Cold War two decades ago. Do we yet know why? As T.S. Eliot noted in Gerontion, “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors…” In 1945, ...

Why Kate Middleton is Prince William’s Only Option

It goes without saying that Prince William is considered by many to be the most eligible bachelor in the world. He's handsome; he"€™ll inherit the Crown Jewels; the Queen is his ...

When Parenting Fails

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” So King Solomon told us (Proverbs 22.vi). A great many parents, down ...


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