Picture This
The news reports from Iraq in the last few weeks have proven once again that, when it comes to weapons of war, nothing packs as much firepower as a camera. The shock and awe of some crude snapshots...
View ArticleHauteur Theory
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had not yet visited the United States when they completed Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Luckily, they didn't let this...
View ArticleThe Terrorist Channel
The writer-director David Cronenberg is often decades ahead of his peers in dramatizing the psychic perils of contemporary life, and never more so than in Videodrome, his wicked 1983 satire of...
View ArticleSunday Night Fever
Sunday is the existential night of the television week. The rueful end to the traditional day of rest and the last gasp of free time before the long, hard slog of school or job ahead, it's one time...
View ArticleSnapped Judgments
The views of the loser do not typically fill prominent chapters in the history books. We know what Julius Caesar thought of the barbarous tribes in Gaul and Britannia, but almost nothing about what they...
View ArticleReality Play
“We are not concerned with the very poor,” wrote E.M. Forster in a famous passage from Howards End. “They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals...
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