Too long; do not read.
Two weeks ago, in the early evening hours of a mild Paris night, the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burst into flames. The images of bright orange flames cast against a steel-blue sky, eating up the very outline of one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, bought …
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“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow I have a pretty shaky educational history. I skipped kindergarten; I went to a religious grade school whose course of study was not especially rigorous; and I dropped out …
The dominant mode of the crime novel in pre-war European fiction was much as it had been since the birth of the genre: the whodunit. Unreeling a mystery, clue by clue, until some heroic or slightly quirky detective could triumphantly announce the identity of the evildoer was the essential nature …
Larry Charles’ comedy credentials, if there is such a thing as comedy credentials and his new Netflix docu-series Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy makes a fairly strong argument that there isn’t, are impeccable. Working as a jokesmith and filmmaker for four decades, he’s been writer for Fridays, Seinfeld, and …
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know anything about Letterkenny. It came more or less out of nowhere, debuting as a series of one-man web videos starring creator Jared Keeso, then transitioned to a full-blown sitcom on something called “Crave TV” (apparently a video-on-demand service in Canada), before finally ending …
In the mid-1960s, a young man from a well-to-do New York family began attending the Little Red School House, a private high school that practiced progressive educational policies and was in favor with some of the city’s most artistic and left-leaning luminaries. It championed humanitarian values, cooperation, internationalism, and a …
So, he’s running. Bernie Sanders, who will be 79 years old when the 2020 election takes place, has announced his decision to run for President of the United States again. To say I am extremely conflicted about this announcement would be an understatement on the level of saying I have …
Capitalism is designed to make you give up. The very nature of class struggle, the very structures capitalism sets up, are made by intent or by accident to exhaust you, confuse you, make you miserable. Even the most dedicated people who organize against it are vulnerable to burnout; for every …
Aretha Franklin died today. All our idols are dead and our enemies are in power, as it’s said in the memes that seem to be our only shared language anymore; and as always happens when someone of such greatness and depth goes away for good, we find ourselves struggling over …
As monotonous and familiar as the movie scene has gotten of late, films can still surprise you. There are films that are shocking because they’re so good; there are films that are stunning because they’re so misbegotten and awful. There are great moments inside mediocre movies, and there are long …
Let us, for the moment, forget about whether there is anything to the so-called ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theories. Let us leave aside whether there is any proof that President Donald Trump or his hangers-on knowingly collaborated with Russian operatives to alter the outcome of the 2016 election. Let us forego the …
Please repeat, as you do every year, the words (written by Paul Fussell) you try to live by on America’s Independence Day. “There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That’s July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well …
As I write this, the country is reeling with the news that a right-wing maniac, armed with a shotgun and bearing a grudge, burst into the offices of a small newspaper in Maryland and murdered five people in cold blood. Normally, this sort of mass killing would barely raise an …
It’s not often that I revisit a television show I’ve already written about in this space, particularly when I’m as busy as I have been lately. But then again, it’s not often that a television show goes so completely and wonderfully off the rails as Riverdale did. The teen-angst TV version …
