Text, subtext and context, As every carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. … But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the “Magic Negro.” And it ends: […]

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes: “Jan — Enjoyed “End the War (On Terror),” the latest entry in her blog BnnRpbias will accuse her of “mandating failure” of course — as if they have any right to preach about success — but it’s just another of their galling pet phrases (like “micromanaging the war”) to deflect attention […]

A friend who deals in matters of national security writes: “All the major newspapers seem to have a common, inexplicable blind spot in discussing the war in Iraq, which I find very disturbing because it obfuscates the fundamental failures, their nature, and their cause.” The most recent example is today’s editorial,

Something else to turn your stomach: The Waverly Inn in the West Village — Manhattan’s “latest clubhouse to the rich and famous under the direction of its host-with-the-mostest, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter” — where a $50,000 mural by

It was two months ago that the “good management” to justify the Justice Department’s political purge of federal prosecutors. Now that his excuse has been exposed as one more Orwellian lie in a BnnRpbiPresident With His Head Up His Ass, the VD’s “mistakes were made” reminds me of Tortured Testimony in January of 2005. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

government of Poland objects to Tuvia Tenenbom that documents and then satirizes the anti-Semitism still visibly thriving in Lodz, the country’s second-largest city, a half-century after the Holocaust. Staged with the simplified power of a cartoon, “Last Jew” puts Polish anti-Semites on trial by ridicule. No wonder the government protests. Self-hating Jews are not spared, […]

something else that happened. We regret not being there. It isn’t everyday that Robert Fisk picks up a But Fisk, if you don’t already know, is the veteran “The Great War for Civilisation” (see Postscript, below*) and “Iraq ousts 10,000 in security ministry.” Coincidentally, a manufacturer of armor-plating for U.S. military vehicles in Iraq pointed […]

Do I hear any bravos for Justin Davidson’s principled stand against the Vienna Philharmonic? He wrote he would not be attending the orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concerts this past weekend. For that matter, he added, “it may be years before I review it again.” This is no small thing. “Vienna is slow to change its tune,” […]

Hellman Wyler Festival, where they’re celebrating Lillian Hellman’s plays and William Wyler’s Hollywood film versions. South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there. Why there? If you ever saw The festival will be staging “The Little Foxes” and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: […]

Don’t have time this ayem to read Seymour Hersh’s short analysis by Ian Black in The Guardian. No time to read that, either? Here’s the lede of The Guardian’s President With His Head Up His Ass] has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 […]

Five little words of wisdom. Robert Altman’s words. Words cited earlier this week in a tribute to the late director at the Majestic Theatre in New York. Smarter words than the old Hollywood cliché cut to the chase, which of course is what he meant. Fitting, too, given the paradox of a filmmaker who loved […]

Shuttling among art and “Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World,” the latest commentary at

Are you ready for three nights of NO!-artist Boris Lurie? I am. Screenings begin this evening in Manhattan. The first one, at Hunter College, is free (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers). The second screening, on Thursday, is at Makor ($15); the third, on Friday, is at Anthology Film Archives ($8). “Most of the […]

Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg’s first That’s my groundling’s take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the “ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves” in Sandberg’s large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It’s not just in the “titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes” that there’s “an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes” or a […]

Chris Hedges was way ahead of the curve. Back in October Prez Huha‘s] administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. Probable? Was he nuts? Three weeks? Really nuts? Well, his timing may have been off, but the clock is still running. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Another old friend is gone. We spent many a winter night together in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, keeping ourselves entertained over a bottle or two. He died in Berlin. He was 81. interview worth reading that fills in lots of details about him. And here’s an excerpt from “THE VOY AGE,” which “started out,” he once […]