At a time in which the ambition of most American cinema can be measured in centimeters, it seems almost unfair to judge Oppenheimer by the distance between the movie it is and the movie it’s trying to be. Based on a much-celebrated book (2005’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy …
Let us dispense, on this sad steaming Wednesday, with how strange it is to cry hot tears of loss and shame for someone you have never met. Let us take it as read the curious nature of fame, the odd parasocial relationships we develop with the famous, the very notion …
Let’s talk about the material analysis. Materialism is half of the brain-peelingly difficult (or quite simple, depending on who you ask) concept of dialectical materialism, and thus a cornerstone of Marxist theory and practice. Decades of cultural shorthand, including the catchy if false-consciousness-plagued #1 dance hit by Madonna in 1985, …
I had to Get Off the Internet this last couple of days because things were getting frankly ridiculous. “Things”, in this case, meant “a mystifying preponderance of liberal/left tone cops flitting around social media finger-wagging at anyone who dared to express, in however ironic a fashion, amusement or pleasure at …
This has been a rough week and I’ve had to make some pretty grim decisions. I could tell you all about it, but then you’d just know about another set someone else’s problems you can’t do anything about. Instead, I’m going to tell you about ten ideas I had for …
We live in an age when the Culture War, the most avoidable conflict in human history, continues to drag on. Despite the fact that it turned out to contain practically nothing we haven’t seen before in half a dozen genres of film aside from some inconsequential shading, the moment Todd …
Every so often, a television series appears that is so unusual, so distinct and with such a deliberately crafted worldview, so unlike anything else that surrounds it in the shifting bars of the channel guides, that it seems like a small miracle that it ever made it on the air …
Who owns the working classes? The question would not seem to be a complicated one. Starting from a philosophical position, the working classes are comprised of individuals who own themselves; they must achieve their liberation through collective action, and only then can they truly become themselves and realize the potential …
The Great Man interpretation of history — the idea that civilization is driven by a few exceptional men of will who impose their vision on the world and shape the development of humanity — was never particularly true, but it’s only been recently that it stopped being taught. Most of …
I don’t know who coined the delightful term “ratfucking”, or when, though I first encountered it in reference to the Richard Nixon administration, which seems entirely appropriate. As a term for acts of political sabotage, it is without peer, as the American political system is largely comprised of rats, and …
I’ve been writing these May Day sermons for, it must be, fifteen years now. I haven’t the courage to look back at all of them to see how my politics have changed over those years; all I know is that it’s been a change for the better, and that I …
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 …
