With top-tier talent unwilling to cross picket lines for the sake of a gala awards ceremony, the folks who put together the Golden Globes (the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, NBC and Dick Clark Productions) scrambled to work around the whole no-actors-showing-up issue but had to settle for a newscast announcing the winners.
Three new memoirs by veterans of the New Left provide nuance and complexity to a tumultuous decade whose political and cultural legacy is still contested. Bonus points to those who can answer the question: Do you still need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows?
If Comedy Central headliners Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert indeed return to television Jan. 7—the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as fate (or whatever capricious force controls networks’ holiday scheduling practices) would have it—they’ll probably have to stage their comebacks without their trusty and witty writing teams.
With religious passions inflaming and complicating politics worldwide, the very project of a secular future is threatened. In “The Stillborn God,” Mark Lilla reveals the roots of the age-old quest to bring political life under God’s authority. He also explores how modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from theological power and build barriers against destructive religious fanaticism.
Late night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien are set to resume their talk shows without writers. An NBC executive says “there are hundreds of people who will be able to return to work as a result of Jay’s and Conan’s decision,” but one imagines dwindling ratings have something to do with their plans. David Letterman, meanwhile, may work out a deal with the Writers Guild that would allow his show to come back with writers.
Can an overheated market remedy an underachieving democracy? Can the public interest be served by an economic engine in which corporate rivals use government to quash their competitors? These and other questions are the subject of a provocative new book by Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton. Benjamin Barber, author of “Jihad vs. McWorld” and “Consumed,” takes a close look at Reich’s argument.
One major price of fame is, famously, the lack of personal privacy that comes with the package. This issue gets trickier when it comes to homosexuality and the practice of outing public figures, as various media outlets have long attempted to do in Jodie Foster’s case.
If Oprah Winfrey can do for politicians what she’s done for books and for any number of consumer items on her “Favorite Things” lists, Barack Obama might have a serious shot at the White House next November. Oprah held court on Sunday at a South Carolina stadium filled with nearly 30,000 Obama supporters, a giant pep rally that “had the feel of a rock concert,” according to Associated Press reporter Seanna Adcox.
A quartet of new books provides an inside look at Pakistan’s nuclear smuggling network and how it flourished. A sordid tale of how the United States simultaneously acted as an enabler for the construction of the “Islamic Bomb” and coddled the Islamists who might one day control it.
In this excerpt from his new book, “The Iran Agenda,” veteran independent journalist and Truthdig contributor Reese Erlich challenges the conventional wisdom on Iran’s nuclear ambitions as he investigates the drive for war.
Todd Haynes’ film “I’m Not There,” “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan,” shows that art reveals truth when it has the imagination to move away from the imitation of reality.
Politicians have always looked to celebrities for support, wanting stars on their team but not always wanting all the drama that can come with the celeb package. But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have chosen carefully—each scoring one of the top picks of the Hollywood litter.
One of the most gifted historians of the American West takes a close look at the remarkable tale of triumph and tragedy that Keith Meldahl recounts in his dramatic story of the largest overland migration since the Crusades, as well as the equally compelling epic of the geology of the harsh and sublime Western landscape.
It’s relatively easy to drum up a list of high-flying entertainers who have publicly backed a Democratic politician in recent years (if not weeks)—Oprah, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand and others readily come to mind—but their conservative counterparts are much harder to ID without resorting to a Google search.
Why is it that so many voters continue to elect reactionaries who do their best to disenfranchise them? The answer, says Paul Krugman in his new book, is racism.
If the combined power of thousands of Buddhist monks staging a nonviolent protest isn’t enough to oust Burma’s oppressive junta, one American hero (cue movie trailer voice-over) is coming to fight for democracy in a faraway land—or at least stick his nose in another nation’s business.
As the first Internet reporter for Yahoo News, Kevin Sites spent a year of living dangerously covering 20 wars all over the world. Is Web journalism the wave of the future? Mark Sarvas, a pioneer of literary blogging, takes a close look.
“Lions for Lambs” is certainly an ambitious movie. It features an ambitious starring lineup, and it plays on ambitious and timely themes: America at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, post-9/11 media complacency and individual responsibility in morally ambiguous situations. Too bad it’s just not a very good movie.
Was the Bush administration’s fevered response to 9/11 made easier by primal American myths of victimization and fear, as Susan Faludi argues in her provocative new book?
As a follow-up to his “Hollywood 10” retrospective essay, and in honor of Friday’s 60th-anniversary commemoration of 1947’s “Hollywood Fights Back!” radio program, author Ed Rampell shows how history has (unfortunately) repeated itself of late in America’s entertainment and news media.
Why Obama’s Strategy Won’t Succeed
