Darren Stevens or Cary Grant?
Tonight is the second episode of what has already become something of a touchstone series this summer, AMC’s Mad Men. To be sure, what has...
The Bronx is Burning, But It Lacks the High Heat
When I got there, the Bronx had already burned. In the mid-80s, I was a reporter for The Riverdale Press covering Bronx politics. The borough...
Ward Cleaver’s Club: the Great TV Dads
Tomorrow, I shall take my breakfast under the covers – a twice-yearly occurrence around case Watson (birthday, too!) – and I shall enjoy the mild...
Richard Thompson’s Sweet Warrior: Battles Everywhere
The earnest thump-thump-thump of the bass drum on Dad’s Gonna Kill Me – the headline-grabbing anti-war single from Richard Thompson’s new Sweet Warrior album –...
Watching for Keira – Almost Nightly
A pirate walked up to me in the mall this holiday weekend as I was loitering outside of Anthropologie, waiting with only moderatre patience for...
What Camus Sees: The Plague Within
There is a scene in The Plague, the relentessly grim post-war novel by existential icon Albert Camus, that still shocks: the hopeless, tortured death struggle...
Defending Edward Hopper
It’s not that Holland Cotter is routinely deranged; the Times art critics wrote a wonderful piece debunking the common myths surrounding Islamic art a while...
On The Road With America
In honor of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer, here’s a repost of a piece I wrote back in October, when The Road seemed like a metaphor for...
Kurt Vonnegut’s Greatest Generation
Kurt Vonnegut proposed an alternative version of World War II glory, a writhing and brutal portrait of internal turmoil and loss and madness that manifested...
Green Beer and English: The Actors and Poets of St. Patrick
The recent news that the Irish and the English come from the same ancient genetic stock, by and large, should be no shock to anyone...
