Saw The Wolf of Wall Street last Friday night (27 December); that's the new movie from director Martin Scorsese and writer Terence Winter (one of the main writers on The Sopranos and the creator, head writer and show runner for another HBO series, Boardwalk Empire), based on the eponymous memoir of convicted financial criminal Jordan Belfort, who ( Read more... )

Slate's William Saletan posted an enlightening comparison between Mitt Romney's being secretly filmed saying, this past May, "'There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what....There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government ( Read more... )

I've said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating here: can we please, please have a moratorium on all championing of Ayn Rand's Objectivist "philosophy" in mainstream political discourse in this country?

I've read enough about her over the years to determine that I've no real interest in actually reading her "masterpieces" Atlas Shrugged and The ( Read more... )

Every now and then a movie comes along that exceeds the plaudits heaped upon it by the critics; I saw such a one last night.


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I really like Paul Krugman's columns for The New York Times (they appear on Mondays and Fridays); nearly every time I read them, I find myself wishing that he was Obama's top economic adviser instead of Larry Summers.

Krugman's column from this past Monday, 14 December ("Disaster and Denial"), was especially poignant and on point, even by his ( Read more... )

Heard Terry Gross's interview with Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday (Tuesday, 24 November); he was flogging his new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. (Sharlet's written some hair-raising articles for Harper's with similar themes; most recently "Jesus ( Read more... )

The current issue of The New Yorker (the 10 August 2009 issue: published last Monday, 3 August, but dated yesterday, this is one of their bi-weekly issues) has a couple of articles that shed a different light on the seminal work of two well-loved children's authors (well, children's and young adult, to be fair): Judith Thurman's "Wilder Women: The ( Read more... )

I finally watched the 1936 Frank Capra-directed screwball comedy (for which he won a Best Director Oscar) Mr. Deeds Goes to Town late last night/early this morning; I was surprised at how much I liked it and even more surprised at how much the missus liked it. (She hates It's a Wonderful Life and barely tolerates It Happened One Night -- this from ( Read more... )

This past Wednesday (28 May), the nationally-syndicated National Public Radio programme Here & Now, which originates at WBUR-FM in Boston, aired two stories pertaining to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the resultant rising tide of foreclosures ( Read more... )

The syndicated National Public Radio (NPR) programme On Point, which originates from WBUR in Boston (90.9 FM), had in its first hour this past Monday, 28 April an interview with Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, who was flogging his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American WorkerThe show ( Read more... )