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"Blue Jasmine" Another Black Mark
AP Images/Andrew MedichiniThe new movie, Blue Jasmine, has been so wildly embraced by critics, while being so replete with its writer-director’s worst tendencies, that it provides the best example in...
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The Six Months That Made the Sixties
AP Images/AnonymousUnless you’re tyrannized by the laws of calendars and clocks, the “Sixties” (as opposed to the 1960s) were born not on a day or at a given hour. Rather they emerged from the six...
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Obama's Crippling Ambivalence
AP Images/Charles DharapakBarack Obama’s presidency is a series of crossroads. The crossroads are moments of decision for a president who is utterly indecisive except, of course, when he’s not a...
View ArticleThe North Wing
From Macbeth to I, Claudius, what makes political drama irresistible isn’t the collective but the intimate. Television writers understand what many historians don’t: Politics is the epic expression of...
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Breaking Bad's Endgame
AP Images/Doug HyunThe Breaking Bad Backlash begins 60 hours from now and, if you listen very hard, you can hear the stirrings already, through the fever pitch of the phenomenon that the show has...
View ArticlePerverting the State of Our Union
The profound truth that’s been lost in the desperate effort to end the federal shutdown is that, more than any time since the 1850s, a significant portion of the current government is hostile to what...
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Lou Reed's Incorrigible Genius
AP Images/ Peter Brooker/REXAfter Bob Dylan, and notwithstanding Brian Wilson and the Motown team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lou Reed was arguably the greatest and most influential American songwriter...
View ArticleAmerica in Words and in the Crosshairs
This has been a week in the crosshairs of history past and present. A century and a half ago the most besieged president ever, under whom half the country went to war against the other half, made the...
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The Coen Brothers' Goodbye Song
AP Photo/CBS FIlms, Alison RosaThe year is 1961 in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, and the title character is a struggling New York City folk singer caught in one of life’s loops. The movie...
View ArticleObama's Lie
Barack Obama is given to the long view, which comes in handy for a man at his particular nadir in this particular moment. More than the vexing and inexplicably botched launch of the Affordable Care...
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New Year, Same Intellectual Dishonesty
AP Images/NBC NewsThe new year searches for a theme. Sometimes annual themes come ready-made; a presidential election looms, or a war. As far as can be seen from the American Rubicon called California,...
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Reports of Obama's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
AP ImagesThe Barack Obama who appeared before Congress a few nights ago missed history’s memo that his presidency is over. It was the same Obama who missed the 2007 memo that Hillary Clinton was going...
View ArticleConversations with My Mother
Last week I had lunch with my mother. At 86 going on 66 she’s remarkable, alert and energetic, in generally high spirits; in the last decade she’s found the church, which I figure is fair enough for...
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As Good As It Gets for Oscar
AP Images/Jordan StraussBy now everyone knows that—as my colleague Tom Carson pointed out last week—Oscar history is strewn with verdicts so absurd as to legitimately raise the question of why anyone...
View ArticleAfter the Midterms: Impeachment?
As analysts and strategists and politicos keep reminding us, Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot this coming midterm election, except for the way in which he is. It’s now clear to anyone who doesn’t need...
View ArticleA Song for Gabriel García Márquez--and the Rest of Us
Obituaries sing the praises of the departed, as they should, but those obituaries that matter most sing our song, too. It’s fortunate that my American first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude is...
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