This review was first published in The eXile on March 21, 2002. Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal…

This classic “prank” first published in the summer of 1999 ranks as one of the eXile’s least-successful pranks (which paradoxically made it x-tra annoying) on our longtime nemesis Michael McFaul–formerly a top Clinton USAID official in Moscow, Carnegie Endowment and…

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a financial flop so far, I don’t know why exactly. It’s aimed directly at the prized demographic of Young People Who Still Go to Theaters to See Movies If Anyone Does, In Order to…

I just found out–belatedly–that one of my childhood heroes, Jack Tatum, died of a heart attack a few days ago. When Tatum played for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s, he was the most intimidating football player of his time–not…

This article first appeared in The eXile on June 1, 2007 For months now, our overseas readers have been asking us, “What’s a gopnik?” They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page:…

I know, I know, I’ve been AWOL a long time. Shoot me. No, seriously. I wouldn’t object. It’d be great to get shot, as long as it was quick and fatal, not somewhere like the shin, where you scream like…

I found Predators to be amusing as hell, but then, I was in just the right mood for it. I’d had one of those brain-melting work weeks when you do nothing but talk to people, prepare to talk to people,…