Market data on display at Taiwan Stock Exchange, by Wang Yu Ching, Office of the President, courtesy CC 2.0 The highs. The lows. The toast breaks. It has been a dizzying day of being a capitalist. My younger son, aware that my elder son has an interest in…
Still from ‘The Boys in Red Hats,’ Shark Dog Films The Boys in Red Hats (2021) is about the 2019 encounter between field-tripping students from an all-boys Catholic school and a small Native American group on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The film is worth a…
Photo courtesy Bibliothek Wissenschaftspark Albert Einstein, Wikimedia Commons Another swing around the sun, so I will try again to define what I have tried before: Let’s say you have good health and time. A clean little space, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a bed…
Military deep-sea divers like to play the world’s fools, even though most are supremely competent and a little piratical. They know what their real work is and find ways to play between bouts of it. This is not “blowing off steam.” It is one answer to the problem of being in the sea and to that of being immersed in any purpose—medicine, management, even writing.
Photo of Didion in 2008 by David Shankbone, courtesy Wikimedia Commons Didion has died. She was the last of American peers (save Gay Talese, who is 89) dubbed New Journalists, and the only woman widely acknowledged to be in the group. The label meant, at least in part,…
Films for the Festival do not have to include entire poems or use poems as scripts; they can also be documentaries about poets or poetic forms, or they can experiment with images and soundtracks inspired by poetry.
We have lived on the Gulf and watched hurricanes organize off the swell of West Africa, grind their way across the expanse of the sea, thread their way through and over the islands, and turn north on the current to hit our coast. We have lived on the Atlantic and…
Joseph Stalin’s funeral procession, from ‘State Funeral,’ Atoms & Void Productions A fascinating 2019 documentary called State Funeral is available now on MUBI, but be forewarned: the film literally moves at the speed of a dirge, as it shows the public funeral of Joseph Stalin, who died…
An AH-64 Apache from the 101st Airborne Division’s Combat Aviation Brigade. U.S. Army photo by Capt. Jarrod Morris, TAAC-E Public Affairs A few months ago I asked the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, if I could ride around with their Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) for a week, in…
Screenshot from the trailer for ‘Julia,’ Sony Pictures The new documentary Julia works to explain why Julia Child still matters culturally, both as the first TV-chef icon and as a feminist who paved the way in two sexist fields: professional cooking and media. The film is directed…
Still from ‘The Beatles: Get Back,’ Disney+ I was in high school when Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered. It was the first Star Trek film, and the first fix for fans since the TV show had ended a decade before. I was never much of a fan…
IFC Films has released a new documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, co-directed by Robert Weide, who in the process of filming Vonnegut over decades created a close relationship with the writer. The film traces this connection, even as it shows Weide’s failure to make his original conception of the documentary—for 40 years.