Look. Politics isn’t easy. It’s terribly difficult, enormously frustrating, full of compromise and defeat. And even though it’s subtle and complex, suffused with gray areas and uncertainty, we still have to define it by its ability to conform to four sections of a lazily drawn grid. We understand. We are …
Paul Kingsnorth, it’s safe to say, is a man of special talent. His work with the Dark Mountain Project — one of the only cultural movements to take seriously the concept of a post-human world — and his insightful environmental journalism alone would be enough to establish his brilliance and …
Stephen King adaptations, as my friend Scott Von Doviak can tell you, are a real mixed bag. When you’re the best-selling author since Johnny Bible, though, everything you write is eventually going to find its way to the big screen, sometimes more than once. The holiday season saw the release …
Brothers! From the Levant I send you greetings, and convey to you the blessings of Allah against the infidel, the invader, and the apostate. I also bring you stamps, as requested, and some of that berry-flavored sparkling water Riad really likes. Riad, this was not easy to find, and you …
This year, I made the decision that all the non-fiction I would read would be about two events, separated by a century but bonded in the blood: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the revolts that spread across France in May of 1968. Both are events that have had a …
There have been a number of films lately — and are likely to be more, as I continue to get older and things I think of as happening in the not-too-distant past become ancient history — in which things are fictionally re-created that I remember as vivid memories. Nothing really …
As I have to tell everyone around this time every year, I’m not really a big fan of the Star Wars franchise. I’m the right age, and the right kind of nerd, but I was preoccupied by other stuff like comic books and role-playing games when I was a kid, and …
It’s been ten years since Donald Westlake left us, and it’s a loss that’s still deeply felt for those of us with a taste for pure throwback noir novels. Westlake was the creator and author, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, of a series of novels featuring the enigmatic professional criminal …
The older I get, the less patience I have for so-bad-it’s-good culture. I get why it’s so appealing to the young — I’ve been there, kids, I understand! — but the closer I get to the eternal silence of the grave, the less willing I am to spend two hours …
I have drunk a thousand beers. A thousand beers have been drunk by me. Since I started keeping track in 2014, my drinking has encompassed a thousand beers. “The Man Who Has Drunk a Thousand Beers” is what they call me in fashionable quarters; some ruffians in low spots prefer …
Okay, let’s first get the obligatory Twitter joke out of the way: The Shape of Water is the best movie you’ll see all year about fish dicks. That was fun, wasn’t it? It feels good to laugh. Now, let’s move on to the actual review of Guillermo del Toro’s latest fantasia. Set …
Death, we are reminded every time someone dies*, comes in threes. A good truism; a strong truism; and most importantly, a truism that can be stated in less than five words, making sure it will lodge in our consciousness before we get bored and go off to play video games …
I’ve been defending the films of Spike Lee for a long, long, long time. I’m old enough to remember having very deep thoughts (well, as deep as could be expected for a 16-year-old suburban white kid) about the first incarnation of She’s Gotta Have It, his very first full-length feature film, and being fascinated …
In my last entry, about the massive betrayal of the American people to a handful of plutocrats via the passage of a license to loot posing as a tax reform bill, I caught a small amount of hell from Democrats, who wondered why I had harsh words for their party. …
The possibility of having to restate the profound and likely irreversible damage the new tax bill will inflict on this country exhausts me. There are only so many times you can say that America is involved in a one-sided class war and that the rich (all of the rich) are …
