Too long; do not read.
In defining the “perfect crime”, there is an interesting debate between criminologists. The most commonly held interpretation is that a so-called perfect crime is one where the perpetrator is never caught – where he gets away with the murder, robbery, or whatever other nefarious deed, and escapes justice entirely. A …
The first one I lost was a long time ago. To the Yanks, of course, back in ’78. That’s when I lost it, I mean, in 1778. I didn’t have it completely off until ’83, I think, but it was certainly the first. Wait, I tell a lie. Before that …
One of the plagues of historical thought is what might be termed the arrogance of modernity. From our lofty aerie here, at the crest of the 21st century, we mistake our point on a line for the peak of a graph. As did every generation before us, we assume that …
“It seemed bizarre that events so serious would be linked causally with a rarified form of academic talk,” Stanley Fish wrote after receiving a call from a reporter asking if September 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. “But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played …
It is often said by those in the business of making dire predictions about our current political system that the goal of the current generation of Republican radicals is the reduction of the American working population to the status of serfs. With all due respect to the thinkers who have …
Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, a documentary (well, actually, a film essay, but why should we split hairs?), has recently come to Netflix Instant after a run on the festival circuit that generated a noisy buzz. Ascher’s film concerns itself with a number of convoluted, complicated, possibly brilliant and definitely insane theories …
The best examples of social progress are always those who are themselves a living testament to the change they wish to make. When Frederick Douglass electrified the nation with his righteous speeches about the horrors of slavery, many in the South doubted that he was ever a slave, because no …
As I write this, America is creaking under the third day of a shutdown of the federal government, forced by as low a group of petulant time-serving cretins as ever bore the title of elected official. It’s a dark time for anyone who believes in the high-school-civics conception of good …
What may be the first truly crucial aesthetic argument of the 21st century – the proper place of video games in the pantheon of the arts – came to a head last week in a fairly spectacular fashion with the release of Grand Theft Auto V. The newest installment in …
MY N.F.L. PICKS FOR THE 2013-2014 SEASON (IN ASCENDING ORDER OF FINISH) 32. Cleveland Browns. Frankly, this is just confusing. Is it the color brown? If so, it’s too conceptual to win. Is it a person named Brown? If so, it all depends on if he’s closer to Jim than …
Charles Mingus is wrong, you see. Mingus is the first (and the greatest, though he’ll have some stiff competition) jazz musician we see, idly coaxing some low mournful notes out of his upright bass in the spacious London loft of jazz aficionado Rod Hamilton (played with maximum glad-handing by Richard …
Let us say that you are an average American consumer, and you have taken it on yourself to purchase a combination shotgun/rod and reel so that you can recreationally kill two kinds of wildlife at once. During a commercial break near the end of the evening’s episode of Law & Order: …
Recently, a number of seemingly unconnected cultural conversations took place which seemed to me to have a common thread running through them. While I don’t necessarily think they add up to any grand indictment of the Way We Live Today (I’m always distrustful of anyone who cherry-picks a few isolated …
So swollen with contempt and pride is our current political body that it is fairly assured, if the Democrats pointed out that the sun rises in the east, the Republicans would instantly counter that it actually rises in the West, and accuse the left of Chinese Communist sympathies for their …
I first got into it when I was in third grade. There was this one older kid, Paulie Troward, who would always get the merry-go-round spinning really fast and then push me off of it. Once I landed on my back? And it knocked all the wind out of me? …
