The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce held a hearing this week on the Digital Age and Disinformation, but it was the same morning President Trump spoke, live, about Iran’s retaliation for the Soleimani killing. The hearing on online tech got lost as we all…
I re-visited the 10-year old documentary The Civilian Conservation Corps this week, as relief from the news that we were stumbling toward another war. Because of the timing, I found it more moving than the first time I saw it, on PBS’s American Experience. It was directed by Robert…
Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, The Irishman, is unusual in several ways: It is a Netflix Original (but had a one-month theatrical run). It is three-and-a-half hours long. And it (badly) CGIs the aging actors for flashback scenes.
The film also could serve as bookend for Scorsese’s gangster-obsessed career.…
In the brief interval between our extended family’s stomach flu and my sudden craving for kimchee (the mouth waters in both cases), I spent one convalescent day on an improvised bed on the floor looking at Cabin Porn.
The blog, which began in 2009, features photos of cabins, huts,…
Near the site of a teahouse for weary travelers in Bashō’s time, now wilderness, something big crashed around in the brambles and vines on a slope, under which I could hear a stream burbling. Then there was birdsong and a light-filled clearing. I did not want to spend the night with my audience.
I have been thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a connection between vulgarity and morality in his essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” collected in his Lectures on Russian Literature. The essay is an indictment of consumerism and not thinking for yourself—bourgeois life in the Flaubertian sense.
“A philistine is a…
This week begins the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, when Hitler tried to split the advancing Allied line in the Ardennes and re-take the port of Antwerp. It was his last major counteroffensive.
The 75th anniversary of European Theater events really got going on June 6th of…
Holidays are so soaked in feelings that their public meanings are often mere pretense. Think of those who feel, for instance, that the most important film of Christmas is the one about that guy from 12 Monkeys trying to machine-gun young Severus Snape.
The…
I was headed home on the highway out of the city and wanted fast food real bad. But I did not stop; I never stop on that route. The problem is not the neighborhoods. It is the side roads with metal debris on them waiting to pop a tire or…
Bong Joon Ho is a South Korean filmmaker with seven films now, the most recent being 2019’s Parasite, the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the first unanimous decision by the jury in several years. Bong’s films are often described as black comedies or fables, for…
A star that was ejected from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, five million years ago, was first seen recently, moving at incredible speed. The observation of gamma-ray explosions seven billion light-years away—“the highest-energy light ever seen from celestial sources”—was announced just this year.
Our…
As the impeachment inquiry makes clear—again—it is difficult to say that which is so. To say true things colorfully or poetically is harder; comically may be even harder; and directly or briefly the hardest of all.
“Simplicity is the final achievement,” Chopin is said to have said. “After one has…