A Website of the Radical Imagination
The greatest virtue of Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian action film, may be its oddity. At first the movie seems a straightforward sci-fi tale of rebellion against oppressive elites—in this incarnation: aboard a megatrain racing perpetually across the frozen world in the wake of a global warming mitigation experiment gone wrong. The passengers, rigidly divided by … Read more
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside … Read more
Writers and cartoonists who refuse to honor Charlie Hebdo aren’t thinking straight. Yet I don’t hate their impulse to distance themselves from those who are down with gratuitous humiliation of Muslims in France or anywhere else.
George Trow sent us the following squib lampooning Tina Brown and her circle as he was composing “Is Dan Mad?” for First back in 1999. It shouldn’t be confused with his more serious “media studies,” but it’s not quite a throwaway either. Trow’s New York Times obituary gave Tina Brown the last word when it … Read more
Ten years ago Armond White surveyed the state of “the movies” and film criticism in his “First of the Month” piece, “Things Done Changed: The McDonald’s Theory of Moviegoing.” White began with a quote from Pauline Kael’s classic 1968 essay, “Trash, Art and the Movies” – “Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us, that it … Read more
A few weeks ago Michael Berube emailed me evidence I’d made a mistake in my foreword to First of the Year: 2010. I’d brought up an unflattering story about Paul Berman that Berube had touched on in his book, The Left at War, and I’d asserted (in a parenthesis) Berube had been unaware Berman had … Read more
Three Responses to Obama’s Cairo Speech. Indispensable Man By Bernard Avishai Immediately after President Obama’s speech, Israeli television interviewed a strapping West Bank settler: “It was very professional,” he said, “very well crafted. It focused brilliantly on the rights of man. But he also quoted the Talmud; and if he read that, then he knows … Read more