Klaatu has a bad day. Number One at the box-office over the weekend, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a great study in all the things that can go wrong with a movie. The plot’s all haywire and the…

Over the past few years, the Washington Post‘s editorial page has pushed an increasingly hostile line toward Russia, painting complex developments there in Manichaean terms and accusing the Kremlin–and usually Vladimir Putin–of responsibility for just about anything that goes wrong, real…

Last Friday, television network NBC announced that it was firing 500 people, or 3% of the workforce. Then today, on MSN (as in “MSNBC,” affiliated with NBC), an article appeared in which a cocky NBC employee, Stephen Lasher, brags like…

It’s 3:45 p.m. in Los Angeles. Outside, the sun is shining, people are walking their dogs. I can hear the laughter of children returning from school … Out here, in the land of sunshine, a few footsteps away from Venice,…

The real junk is inside National Geographic Tomorrow evening, the National Geographic Channel is going to hit cable viewers with a huge dose of drug propaganda cloaked as investigative reporting in a three-part special that will look at Heroin, Meth…

Malcolm Gladwell, successful author. Ever wonder why you’re not rich and/or famous? If you’re an American, of course you have. Or, if you happen to be one of the lucky few who’ve actually gotten rich and/or famous, your reaction when…

The problem with Twilight isn’t that it’s an embarrassing fantasy for teenage girls—hell, I was a teenage girl myself once, so whatever celluloid dreams get the poor addled kids through seventh grade are okay by me. No, the problem is…