This is theater!

I went to a play recently, I’m ashamed to admit. It was a Tom Stoppard play called Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is embarrassing beyond words. It wasn’t my idea!

But even so, I went with …

Got ninety minutes to kill?

When you’re a young Have in a rich country, you’ve got a glorious wealth of time to waste, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a movie that’s about young Haves, for …

The fix was in. There’s no other way to explain the disconnect between Sarah Palin’s performance in last night’s debate–which made me cringe so much that my forehead started to …

Experimental film called The Debate

Don’t know if you were watching TV last Friday evening, but if you were, you noticed that all the network channels were running this bizarre experimental film called The Debate. It featured a 90-minute …

Gervais confronts his mortality in laxative form

Jeez, it just doesn’t pay to get your hopes up, you know? You see a preview for a movie about a guy who hates people and then sees ghosts and hates them …

John McCain is making a big show of criticizing the government “bailout” of insurance giant AIG. But it turns out that AIG, which received $85 billion in US tax dollars earlier this week, is …

Last weekend, I was at an opening of a new Tibetan restaurant by the Red Square with a bunch of American expats. The new Cold War never came up, but that was because nobody wanted to ruin a …

Last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin declared that she was willing to go to war against Russia on behalf of Georgia. Palin wasn’t talking about launching World War III on behalf of our Georgia–you know, the adorable Southern …

What’s so funny?

If you really want to appreciate the highly realistic portrait of America the Coen brothers have been working on for twenty-odd (very odd) years now, I recommend reading the “viewer responses” to Burn After Reading on …

John McCain boards the “Kiss My Elitist Ass Express” Yacht

John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid “celebrity” and “elitist.” But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking …

Sarah Palin Looking Hot, Hot, Hot

All this talk of Sarah Palin for Vice President has gotten so pervasive you can hear it as you walk down the street, a kind of sinister hiss eddying around you …

Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named Republican VP nominee. But I’d been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to a group called Defenders of Wildlife–and in her time as governor of …

I saw a jet trail in the sky this morning and wondered why there aren’t so many of them any more. And instantly started grinding through the useless, absorbing little inquisitions that keep the mind from wasting its …

Democratic Convention Clown

If you watched the Democratic Convention coverage, like I did, you know there’s no point complaining about it. That’d be like going to the circus and saying, “This is a horrible place, absolutely infested with clowns.”

And …

I just flew back to the U.S., just in time to watch the Democratic Convention’s opening night. I’m amazed by how Soviet my country has become, or always was. We love these hokey big ceremonies just as much as any totalitarian …