Captive Audience
So what's playing right now?
By Sacha Mardou
January 13, 2016

So what's playing right now?
By Sacha Mardou
January 13, 2016

Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?
I laughed and told my son that the singer reminded me of myself in high school—gawky, skinny, comic not handsome, watching everyone else but doing your own thing a little too enthusiastically.
By Gerald Early
I am the same age as Jayne Kennedy, and her memoir does a wonderful job of recreating how exciting a time it was if—to paraphrase singer and pianist Nina Simone—one were young, ambitious, and Black.
By Gerald Early
Fox News Channel’s political anchor Bret Baier’s new book, “The Case for America,” is just in time for the 250th anniversary season. It feels a bit hasty in its composition, which gives a reader the sense that it was a book aimed at a ready market: people who want a book that is positive about the United States at this particularly divisive juncture, when many think the country is on the verge of its third political divorce.
By Gerald Early
Other books examine the same subject, though none are quite the same sort of synthesis this book is, a massive history that reads a bit like a massive novel. Indeed, as the accumulation of detailed narrative mounts, the reader finds it more unreal and unfocused, as if, as George Orwell said, in Asia, the closer and more finely tuned the view, the vaguer it gets.