Carl Conetta lays it out in “Vicious Circle,” his research monograph on “The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq, Part One, Patterns of Popular Discontent” for the Project on Defense Alternatives. In clear language, the academic sound of the title notwithstanding, Conetta offers the strongest, most detailed and comprehrensive, fully documented understanding of the […]

The Washington Post confirms that former FBI agent Mark Felt was the source for leaked secrets about Nixon’s Watergate coverup. Waving the Flog Now that Deep Throat’s blown his cover,Eliminating every maybe,The only question still remainingIs what to make of Barbara’s Baby. His devil daddy showed him howTo steal the White House like a thief,So […]

“Preventive Warriors,” a documentary about the National Security Strategy of the United States issued by the White House in September of 2002, is the perfect antidote to Dear Leader’s Memorial Day ravings (a pious official proclamation for “a day of prayer for permanent peace” and an imperial radio address to the nation that the U.S. […]

Chicago, America’s most underrated metropolis, is the capital of flyover country. So unless you grab one or both of its major dailies while changing planes at O’Hare (or you’re a news junkie Web surfer), you’re missing out on some entertaining columns. Here’s one by Debra Pickett, of the Chicago Sun-Times, headlined “Freedom’s just another word […]

A case of plagiarism! May 20: “One day historians will ask how we stood by and let this happen.”— Straight Up May 26: “When future historians look back on this period, they will wonder, most of all, I think, how we let it go without a fight.”— Altercation Talk about plagiarism, how about this? If […]

We’re so late on this it’s disgusting. A friend from Mississippi writes: Today I was listening to local “Talk Radio” and the topic was about the new Pope, who had just been elected. One woman called in and said, “Oh, I was hoping so much that it would be a Baptist this time!” My staff […]

We’re so late on this it’s disgusting and ridiculous. A while ago The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here were this year’s winners, which the staff also forgot to post: 1. […]

The Chrysler Building gets the lyrical treatment for its 75th birthday in today’s New York Times from: David W. Dunlap: “Juke Joint in the Sky”Michael J. Lewis: “Dancing to New Rules, a Rhapsody in Chrome”Charles McGrath: “A Lunch Club for the Higher-Ups”William L. Hamilton: “On Top of the World, Drafting, Dreaming and Drilling”Elaine Louie: “How […]

It’s good to see William Wyler getting his due from Time magazine film critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. In the current issue, they’ve chosen Wyler’s “Dodsworth” as the best flick of the ’30s, along with Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” Akira Kurosawa’s […]

One of the comments in yesterday’s item struck me as particularly relevant to the death of arts criticism in general: “Mass marketing requires a reductive concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness.” Anyone with the slightest cognizance of pop culture knows this by now. But back in 2000, […]

The front page of today’s ArtsJournal points to a story in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times headlined “Critical condition,” about the death of arts criticism. The Times subhead summarizes the gist of the story: “Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or […]

By Jan Herman One day historians will ask how we stood by and let this happen: “He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. … [H]is legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. … When he […]

Norman Mailer is at the top of his game in “On Sartre’s God Problem,” an essay that appeared in Libération, the liberal French daily, which recently marked the centenary of the French philosopher’s birth. Reprinted in the current issue of The Nation, it begins: “I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, […]

What do John Cusack, Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, Richard Linklater and Aaron Mcgruder agree on? The winner of A Flash Contest to Stop the Republican Social Security Scam. Go there. Click START. It’s fun. Postscript: Score one for Cusack, Franken et al. The business exec whose theory is behind Dear Leader’s “plan to trim Social […]

There’s a new book out about Buster Keaton, which I reviewed a couple of Sundays ago. If you’re interested, go here or here. Some of what I wrote went thisaway: Like Welles, though in an earlier time and on a different scale, Keaton was a master filmmaker whose creativity was leached out of him by […]

In the mounting catalogue of National Public Radio’s recent troubles the David D’Arcy affair ranks lowest in public visibility. In part this is because D’Arcy is an arts reporter, and arts reporting exists in a journalistic ghetto. The arts hold less news interest for the public and for news editors themselves than politics, sports, business […]

If you do nothing else today, you must watch Bill Moyers’s fucking terrific speech about the accusation of liberal bias made against his old PBS show “Now” and the Public Broadcasting System by right-wing government creep Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers responded to the charge on Sunday at the National […]