America has always done things differently. Sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes it’s not. Falling firmly on the “not” side of the divide is the way this country observes — I don’t say celebrates — Labor Day. In most other countries, the holiday that celebrates the working class falls on May Day, …
This week, I recorded my third appearance on Just One More Thing, a podcast about Columbo hosted by my friends Jon Morris and RJ White. I was the first guest the show ever had, and despite that, Jon and RJ were kind enough to have me back. It’s been a pleasure …
Shalom Auslander got the best possible start on having a sickly fatalistic sense of humor: he was a miserable Jew from the day he was born. As detailed in his highly entertaining 2007 memoir Foreskin’s Lament, Auslander was raised a deeply unhappy Orthodox Jew in and around New York in the …
THIS AND THAT, THEY MUST BE THE SAME Of all the beloved tropes in the modern liberal catalog, none is so valued as profound mockery of the idea that “both sides do it” — that is, that the reason blinkered malcontents foolishly vote for third parties (or, quelle horreur, do not …
Imagine yourself far away, in a landlocked country in the southeastern part of Asia. You are a farmer’s wife. You have never had anything to do with politics; though you are aware that the Pathet Lao, the nation’s communist guerrillas, are plotting against the monarchy and are working with military …
Some people prefer fiction, they will tell you, because it is infinitely malleable. While history must only tell us what is known, fiction can tell us what is merely imagined, and it can do it in any order; only fiction, some have argued, can tell a truly complete story, because …
Socialism has, to put it mildly, a bit of a bad reputation. This may sound like an absurd statement in this year of 2016, especially if you live your life on the internet. It has only been a few years since socialist candidate Kshama Sawant won a spot on the …
Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller Stranger Things is one of those shows that it’s almost impossible to talk about for all the wrong reasons. A critical and popular success, any chance of talking about it on its actual merits has already been buried under an avalanche of thinkpieces, listicles, clickbait articles, and animated …
One of my historical obsessions is the Second World War and its immediate aftermath — a period which directly shaped our current political climate, but which far too many people know very little about. Almost everything we can learn about the current state of world affairs can be traced back …
There are, in the vast field of toil we call the entertainment industry, people who have a tremendous amount of ability, but never get quite the right project. They are often possessed of a very singular talent, one that can’t easily be plugged into a generic formula, and as a result …
I won’t be watching the Democratic National Convention this week. I don’t care for pomp in a time of hardship; I’m not interested in seeing elites congratulate themselves on their moral rectitude; and most of all, I watched enough of the dismal Republican get-together and there’s only so much shit …
There is no such thing as purity in cinema, and even the expressions we find most effective and audacious are compromised in a million little ways before we ever come close to seeing them. One change, in the casting or in budget or even in the weather, and the movie …
Better Call Saul might have seemed like it was born with the television equivalent of a silver spoon in its mouth. Afforded every advantage by the AMC network, and bringing with it a built-in audience from Breaking Bad, one of the most successful and acclaimed cable dramas of all time, it …
Six months ago, if you had a grown adult wearing a t-shirt with a children’s character crash into you in a public place because they had their face buried in a cell phone screen and weren’t’ paying attention to their surroundings, odds were pretty good they were just using Duolingo …
We kill our idols at such an alarming rate, you’d think we could afford to replace them. At a time when great artistic achievement is increasingly hard to find, we have been gripped with a mania for casting the few geniuses our culture manages to mint aside with great force, …
