For an opening-day news story about the “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park, you might as well read the London Guardian’s report, which offers a more than adequate overview. For an opening-day appraisal, you might as well read the front-page appraisal in The New York Times by art critic Michael Kimmelman, who spares no […]

Rigorous Intuition’s Jeff Gannon exposé is not to be missed. Thanks to James Wolcott’s Mystery Beefcake, I just read RI’s “Stirring the White House honey pot,” about Jim Guckert, a k a Jeff Gannon of suddenly defunct Talon-News.com, “a conservative ringer” who received White House press credentials and “lobbed softball questions” at Dear Leader in press briefings. […]

“I don’t know a critic who penetrates to the center of anything,” the late, great playwright Arthur Miller once said, according to his front-page obituary in The New York Times. But it would be hard to find a better understanding of what was central in Miller’s work than this morning’s appreciation, “A Morality That Stared […]

PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie released the following statement this afternoon about Arthur Miller, who died Thursday at the age of 89: Arthur Miller was a writer of genius. He made plays with the grandeur and power of high tragedy, revealing what he called, in the opening stage directions of “Death of a Salesman,” […]

For the record: From Name: Jim in TexasEmail Address: ———Comments: Noam Chomsky is a lying evil whore of Zarqawi’s murdering criminals and mass murdering lying tyrants like Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, and Saddam Hussein and we are going to send every last one of his leftwing Fascist thug’s to Hell. In a century from […]

The sane rationality of Noam Chomsky’s words and tone of voice offers a tonic to anyone who still has hopes for American idealism. Listening to him this morning on Democracy Now!, which broadcast a talk he gave recently in Santa Fe, N.M., I jotted down some notes. Chomsky, right, spoke about imperialism, Iraq, terrorism, pre-emptive […]

Matt Haber, in typical shallow fashion, has posted the titles of the other books on Georgie Boy’s reading list. Unlike the much-bruited “His Excellency: George Washington” by Joseph P. Ellis, “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow, the holy Bible, Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and (who could forget?) Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy” — […]

When a majority of American voters re-installed Georgie Boy in the White House, it signalled not just a callous affirmation of his criminal regime, or a foul disregard of human rights at home and abroad, but most of all an overarching moral hypocrisy. Well, it’s payback time for the majority’s willingness to look the other […]

“We just got wired into the system.” Is this the future? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

From Brian Urquhart’s “Extreme Makeover” in The New York Review of Books: In his recent book on the Scottish Enlightenment James Buchan writes of Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, “Men and women were coming to suspect that knowledge acquired through skepticism might be more useful in this world below than knowledge ‘revealed’ by scripture.” […]

Carol Reed was “a passable journeyman who could sometimes push a story along.” So sayeth Christopher Byron in The Sunday Times of London, referred to earlier. Jan — After Hitchcock left to work for Selznick, Carol Reed was the best director in England, and made some excellent movies before he went to war — “Midshipman […]

I don’t even want to think about the state of our banana nation, so with apologies to Leonard Cohen for borrowing the title of his first book of poetry, here’s a comparison of three news stories that appeared earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post about […]

Today is Groundhog Day and, as history has it, James Joyce‘s birthday. FINNEGANS BASH“Tell me now, then, is it your shadow,You’re seeking, Punxsutawney Phil?If so, you’d best be looking poorly,Else we’re stuck with the full winter’s drill.“Follow the modus op of that slackerFinnegan Seamus Patrick Dougherty(Who thumbed his nose at enslavement to duty)And hoist a […]

Arts & Letters Daily is one of the Web’s great cultural boons. It is no more than a content aggregator, but its links provide some of the most intellectual articles for a general audience to read about literature, philosophy, history, sociology and science. I don’t mind that the site leans strongly to the libertarian right. […]

Dontcha just love it? PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) — The American Nazi Party has volunteered to pick up trash along a quiet stretch of rural road in Oregon state, causing an uproar after getting a sign placed there crediting its work. And they’ve got some fine little helpers. The sign, on a quiet stretch of road […]

As long as I’m posting messages from friends and messages about movies, here’s one about another movie (more or less) from another friend, a guy who calls himself Mr. Cheer, whom I’d tipped to Christopher Bray’s review of Clinton Heylin’s new book, “Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios,” in the Sunday (London) […]