Memphis, Tennessee lives way outside any law. Black, Hispanic, and neo-Nazi street gangs control neighborhoods throughout the city with no cops allowed in, not that most people would want them around. The downtown area has a higher concentration of deranged…

The best way to understand Larry Summers, the man who’s shaping America’s economy from his director’s chair at the National Economic Council, is to meet the people he hangs out with. Once you get to know Larry Summers’ crowd, nothing…

When I heard Quentin Tarantino was making a Dirty Dozen-like action film set in WWII, I groaned in spirit. With all the amazing eras and dazzling historical figures and slaughterhouse horrors not yet represented in cinema, we’re going to visit…

How does your extended family shake out politically? Me, I come from a rabid tribe of right-wingers containing a renegade band of fulminating lefties, plus a couple of pleasant and reasonable moderates nobody listens to. Fortunately we’re all scattered across…

I came to extreme poverty late in life, and did very badly at it. I should have done some kind of crime. But what kind? That’s what I couldn’t figure out. What kind of crime can you actually do, if…

There are a couple of strokes of genius in District 9 that renew one’s hopes for the future of genre film. One is casting Sharlto Copley, who’s not a trained actor, as protagonist Wikus van der Merwe, a dweeby South…

News Flash! Five months after Yasha Levine and I broke the story linking the rightwing billionaire-PR nexus between FreedomWorks, the Koch family, CNBC, Eric Odom and the Tea Party movement, the Washington Post finally caught up with us. In an article…