The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance. The film critics are the least of it: … Read more

Nothing lasts forever. After several decades of dire warnings about its frailty, what if the novel — long the linchpin of print culture — has finally died? It can happen; one day, it will happen. We novelists used to have the public by the nape of its collective neck, dependent on us for the lion’s … Read more

“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.” Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations in 1845, when his two nations were very famously the rich and the … Read more

In Game Three of the Cleveland-Orlando NBA Eastern Conference Finals, with the Cavaliers trailing 77-70, announcer Doug Collins reached for an adequate descriptive term for Lebron James, and came up with: locomotive. On the very next play, James drove the middle and collided with Dwight Howard, Orlando’s all-league center, who has been described as “insanely … Read more

“Thank you, Doctor.” – Johnny Carson Tom Hale’s measured praise of First of the Year [http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=257] ends up as a funeral oration for the paper. Not so fast. His review has a simple structure. First of the Month set out to be a (the?) new Partisan Review; between 9/11 and Iraq, it lost its way … Read more

Addressing the United States Congress in February 1990, newly-elected Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel said his “one great certainty” is that “consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.” It is this idea that is debated and ultimately upheld in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 movement and Velvet … Read more

“Are we still alive?” That’s the line incarnating the unexpectedly avant-garde challenge in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. It’s when the film steps beyond the simple conventions of genre filmmaking—of being a movie about an invasion from Mars—and expresses our very contemporary concern with survival. Yes, this line speaks to post-9/11 consciousness. It gets … Read more