Too long; do not read.
The question so memorably posed by Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman — “Hubba hubba hubba, who do you trust?” — has become of rather grave importance in recent years. With Donald Trump in the White House, the Republican war antagonism to the press, at a low boil at the best of …
When you get right down to it, for capitalists, slavery was a hell of a good deal. It opened up new markets, it was a self-reproducing form of labor, and best of all, it provided a very inexpensive and largely docile workforce. Its failure, if you remove morality from the …
Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight — his second feature film and a quantum leap from his first, the fascinating but slight Medicine for Melancholy — is a film that builds itself up by little moments. Very little happens in the movie itself; it is slow and deliberate, with many of its major events implied …
My origin story with hip-hop still burns in my brain like it happened yesterday. Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell had just been released, and for me — a white suburban kid who’d been raised an only child in a house full of outlaw country and ‘beautiful music’ — it seemed like something being …
When I was much younger, a writer named Paul Slansky put out a book that had a huge effect on me. The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the Reagan ’80s was formulated by its author as a defense mechanism, what we’d call today a means of self-care — …
Nina Simone was such a singular and remarkable talent that the story of her success seemed almost inevitable. The scientist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that there was less to interest him in the folds of Einstein’s brain than there was in the near certainty that people just as brilliant …
This will be my last entry of 2016. Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America. Trump has spent the hours since the …
Joe Sacco’s Palestine was first published in 1993 as a series of single-issue comic books, based on the author’s trip to the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip towards the end of the First Intifada. It was collected by Fantagraphics into a single edition in 1996, at a time when there …
As I’ve discussed endlessly in this space, one of my favorite things about the right-wing persecution complex that’s been so carefully cultivated by conservative politicians over the last 50 years or so is hearing people complain about things that are not only not actually happening, but are the opposite of …
It’s inevitable, in the face of any great political defeat or party realignment, for loyalties to get a bit shaky. Confusion rules the day, and the ally of yesterday is the heretic of tomorrow. Only a few months ago, when it looked like the Republican Party was about to shake …
Tampopo was a first for me in a lot of ways: not only the first movie I’d seen by Juzo Itami, but the first Japanese comedy I’d ever seen, and one of the first Japanese films I’d seen at all outside of Akira Kurosawa and a few samurai period pieces. …
One of those odd little quirks of timing that happens in the world of cinema took place this year when not one, but two films based on the life of Christine Chubbuck were filmed and released at almost exactly the same time. The first was Christine, a more or less straightforward …
Donald Trump isn’t even president yet and the liberal establishment is already in a frenzy, convinced that the apocalypse has arrived and that if we don’t hang Mitch McConnell for treason right this second, it will mean the end of the American Dream. Some are even lapsing into an all-too-familiar …
Say, did you know that television has gotten really good now? You bet your ass you did, because you’re alive and reading the internet. You could no more be ignorant of the rise of Quality Television than you could of the existence of Pizza Rat, or of how Donald Trump is …
When I started drinking, there was no such thing as “craft beer”. If you didn’t like the weak, watery, tasteless crap that passed for beer in America, you did one of two things: you found a bar that carried foreign beer (Guinness, usually, maybe something exotic from Germany or, if you were …
