Reviews > Movies
Conservulous
A movie mocking Hollywood liberals is overdue, but a movie mocking Michael Moore is outdated. David Zucker, director of zany comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, sets his satirical sights on a ripe target: the self-satisfaction of bleeding-heart Hollywood liberals (the kind who decry world poverty while collecting multi-million dollar paychecks).… READ MORE >
Opinion > Issues
Sarah Palin blasts Obama’s radical abortion policies
If you want to extract information from suspected terrorists, force them to listen to an endless loop of Sarah Palin speeches. I guarantee it would work. (Fortunately, John McCain is against torture.) Yet despite her grating voice and her muddled syntax, Palin managed on Saturday to pull off an effective pro-life speech that artfully strung… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Cosmic Slop
Yes, it’s The Verve’s fourth album, Forth. A bad pun is a suspicious beginning for an album with philosophical pretensions, especially since the word “forth” suggests a progression, when Forth is more like a reminder: “Remember us? We’re The Verve. We used to make epic Britpop. We still do.” The clouds… READ MORE >
Magazine > Culture
Damien Hirst: The Death of Art Explained
As Wall Street tanks, the Art Market soars. The Damian Hirst auction at Sotheby’s London (Sept. 15-16, 2008) raked in $198 million (£111 million), creating a new jaw-dropping record for a one-artist sale. Hirst’s own record for the highest price he has yet fetched for one of his pieces was also surpassed at this sale with a whopping $18.8… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Funny as Hell
There’s a segment of the Tonight Show called “Jaywalking,” where Jay Leno asks regular Joes (“Joe Sixpacks”?) simple questions about history, politics, geography, etc. Considering the answers he gets, you’d think Burbank a social experiment gone wrong. Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect, adopts the… READ MORE >
Opinion > Business
Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian God that Failed
In today’s NY Times, Peter Goodman’s excellent profile of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan confirms what I’ve been writing, that it was a specific “structure of sin”—financial speculation—rather than mere human greed (or bad home loans) that created the credit crisis. I’d always wondered how a rigid anti-government… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Disasters of War
So here we are, facing a global economic collapse and an election where both candidates represent the lesser of another evil. It’s time to turn to Kurt Vonnegut, whose unique blend of bleak humor, genuine outrage, and dark surreality seems more relevant than ever, and more cogent than a cadre of political and economic analysts. Armageddon… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
God is Godard
Reprise is a movie about young Norwegian writers that feels made by young French filmmakers: stylish, self-conscious, angsty, funny, a little sloppy, and unapologetically pretentious. Erik and Philip are two aspiring writers and lifelong friends who simultaneously slide their manuscripts (as precious to them as bundled babies) into a mail… READ MORE >
Opinion > Movies
Waugh’s Unlikely Champions
In the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn demonstrates a supple understanding of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—its themes and ambitions. Many have criticized the latest film version of the classic Catholic novel for playing fast-and-loose with the source material, but Mendelsohn is one of the few critics to analyze with… READ MORE >
News > World
Holy See Denounces Misuse of Protection Principle
The Vatican continues to take every opportunity to discourage preemptive war: "The use of violence to resolve disagreements is always a failure of vision and a failure of humanity. The responsibility to protect should not be viewed merely in terms of military intervention but primarily as the need for the international community to come together in the face of crises to find means for fair and open negotiations, support the moral force of law and search for the common good," Also see this statement. READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
The Same Man?
I suspect that the title of this little dual biography was intended to produce in the potential reader (i.e., anyone even a little familiar with Waugh and Orwell) precisely the reaction it produced in me upon hearing it: I exclaimed something to the effect of, “Say what?” and promptly plunked down twenty-six bucks (minus my local indie… READ MORE >
News > Business
Behind AIG’s Fall, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
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