All about me.
Imagine the boy. He is twelve years old. Like many victims of poverty and racism, he has learned early on that there is very little space for him in the great white world. He knows that those who get out are able to get out because they can either make …
Barring some unforeseen development — a deeply justifiable act of propaganda by the deed, for example, or the revelation that he thinks Marine Todd is a big sissy Mary — Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. Less than a week after dragging Carly Fiorina back out for another round …
The arrest and trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman, didn’t just fit the bill of ‘Trial of the Century’ as well as anything that’s ever happened. It was an event of seismic cultural significance, a slow-moving disaster that was …
I have been fascinated with religious cults since before I even knew what they were. I was barely old enough to understand what was happening at Jonestown, Guyana, when the greatest mass slaughter of American citizens to date took place under the auspices of a lunatic named Jim Jones, but …
There is likely no one more qualified to have written China’s Second Continent than Howard W. French. A veteran foreign affairs correspondent for the New York Times, French is well-versed in Chinese politics and was raised in Africa by American parents. Almost a decade ago, he left the paper to pursue one …
It’s baseball season, and that, friends, is the best of all seasons. Baseball writers, who, given their love of a game that has historical weight over all other American sports, tend to be a poetic and sentimental lot, even more obnoxious than people who mark out over other sports. They’re …
Much as the leads of Netflix’s series Love have mixed feelings upon meeting — it’s really not so much what you would call a ‘meet cute’ as a ‘meet indifferent and slightly hostile’ — I had mixed feelings about the series itself. This was largely due to its pedigree. Love‘s creators are …
I am an old man and I still get a lot of my news via the hand delivery of paper products, so it is no surprise that I have a hard time understanding much that is happening in the world today. I still think that art should be judged on …
Kim Zupan is a carpenter from Missoula, Montana. He is also a writer, though his work was unknown to me until I picked up his debut novel, The Ploughmen, earlier this year. It has a remarkably confident and clear voice for a first book, and while it features a few missteps characteristic of …
Full disclosure before I start talking about Old Fashioned: I love supper clubs. I’ve visited a bunch of them in Wisconsin, and I love the old-school charm, the professionalism, the atmosphere, the consistency, the community and sociability of them. I bought the DVD as part of a planned excursion up to Arthur’s …
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the release of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The Music Box is commemorating the year by showing a lot of classics from 1941, so we decided to take in a matinee. It’s almost impossible to say anything about Citizen Kane anymore. My partner, who’d never seen …
This weekend, the Gene Siskel Film Center, as part of the generally excellent programming at the Chicago European Union Film Festival, screened I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman on a double bill with the Belgian director’s final film before her unexpected death last year, No Home Movie. Akerman was …
Lately I’ve been thinking about the revivalists. That is, the wave of writers – whose God is Roy Thomas and whose Jesus is Grant Morrison (Neil Gaiman, I guess, would be the Holy Ghost) – who specialize in rescuing old characters from Marvel & DC’s equivalent of limbo and then …
There are lots of things to regret about the surging campaign of Republican front-runner/leaking colostomy bag Donald Trump: the way the American electoral process has become the sport of clowns; the fact that he’s so badly shaken the G.O.P. that people like John Podhoretz are starting to sound sensible by …
This is one of the most contentious election cycles in recent history. On the right, you have a Republican Party thrown into chaos because the most popular candidate is not just a racist, right-wing demagogue, but a racist, right-wing demagogue who is not yet under the control of the party …
