Tag: critical mass

Dune: Part Two Is a Masterwork of Complexity

Villeneuve is for the most part scrupulously faithful to the source material, which makes his most significant departures interesting and worth lingering on. The biggest is to compress the story chronologically so that Paul’s sister Alia, conceived weeks before the end of Part One, remains in utero at the end of Part Two (Herbert and […]

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Dune: Part Two Unleashes the Terrible Power of Paul

Villeneuve is for the most part scrupulously faithful to the source material, which makes his most significant departures interesting and worth lingering on. The biggest is to compress the story chronologically so that Paul’s sister Alia, conceived weeks before the end of Part One, remains in utero at the end of Part Two (Herbert and […]

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What Holocaust Remembrance Forgets

Part of the Holocaust’s unknowability stems from its origins. Stone points in particular to the role of ideology in spurring the mass murder. We know well, naturally, that Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists were rabid antisemites. Hitler’s infamous autobiography Mein Kampf is an antisemite’s manifesto and Nazi propaganda was replete with antisemitic stereotype. […]

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Poor Things Is a Glorious Mash-Up

The film follows Bella’s picaresque adventures, as she leaves home to seek adventure, wisdom, or, ideally, both. Together, she and Duncan travel to Lisbon, where Bella wanders through the streets, blissfully unchaperoned and dressed in a puffy-sleeved top and bloomer shorts. “I found nothing but sugar and violence,” she reports back to Duncan. She can’t […]

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What Betty Friedan Knew

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born in 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the first child of Harry and Miriam. By the time they’d had another daughter and the main event of the longed-for son, Betty’s parents were beginning to find their eldest’s braininess worrisome. They learned, Shteir writes in her conscientiously researched book, “that to control Betty, […]

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Democracy Is in Peril, Just Not the Way We Thought

Levitsky and Ziblatt still make comparisons with other countries to marvelous effect, thickening their arguments in a gumbo of historical and contemporary examples from Brazil, Hungary, Argentina, Thailand, Italy, Chile, Germany, South Korea, and countless other states. But they also dig far deeper than before into America’s own violently authoritarian past, and the way that […]

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Thurston Moore Said It Better in Music

The band found fans in America’s emerging punk clubs, and in Europe, where they were feted as the next big thing. By 1988’s Daydream Nation, the band were standard-bearers of the indie underground that now included hard-core punk groups like Black Flag alongside more melodic, even tuneful groups like REM and The Replacements. (Critic Robert […]

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Christopher Rufo’s Troubling Path to Power

From the mid-1990s onward, William S. Lind, a writer at the paleoconservative Free Congress Foundation, spread this account through a series of speeches, publications, and even a documentary film. In 2004, Lind published a book that included a compendium of cultural Marxist “profiles” with entries for Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert […]

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Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians

How to summarize nearly a century of Zionist and Palestinian bloodshed and peacekeeping—of industrialization and expulsion, the birth of a “rules-based international order,” war, occupation, the DotCom boom? Loewenstein begins with his own story: He grew up in a “liberal Zionist” community in Melbourne—his grandparents had fled the Nazis in 1939, arriving in Australia as […]

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Patrick Deneen’s Escape from Liberalism

This is an argument that has long been made by thinkers on the left. Deneen, however, reconfigures it by placing the evolution of the American political system amidst a semi-mystical battle between “the few” and “the many” that dates back to the dawn of time. In Deneen’s version the many are not masses seeking radical […]

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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: Accidentally a Comedy?

Perhaps this is the perspective that Scott, an 85-year-old Englishman, learned in school; certainly the script (written by David Scarpa, who previously collaborated with Scott on All the Money in the World) seems to have more respect for the Duke of Wellington, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who handed Bonaparte his final defeat, than it does for […]

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Nicolas Cage Can’t Escape Himself in Dream Scenario

It’s telling that Borgli’s producer for Dream Scenario is the enterprising horror specialist Ari Aster. His 2023 Beau Is Afraid cultivates a similar patch of thematic terrain, with Joaquin Phoenix starring as a middle-aged wreck navigating the shoals of his own paranoia; done up in shlubby, shuffling sad-sack drag, Phoenix even resembles Cage. The prevailing […]

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Big Publishing Killed the Author

More than ever before, editors and authors became cogs in a corporate machine, and these pressures increasingly showed up in their output. Then everything changed. In 1960, the newspaper Times Mirror Company purchased the mass-market publisher New American Library, inaugurating what Sinykin calls “the conglomerate era.” That same year, Random House went public and, flush […]

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A Murder at the End of the World Is Isolation TV at Its Best

The whole thing plays out as a True Detective in the style of Michael Clayton—a prestige whodunit fused with a startling comedy about the nearly occult style of corporate rot. The characters often speak with ethereal poetry, as if they’re mediums channeling spirit voices from beyond the veil. Lee, for instance, telling Darby that the […]

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The End of Milton Friedman’s Reign

Friedman was not, by any reasonable definition of the word, a socialist in 1947, and always wanted the market to be the tool that solved social problems. It was for this reason that he became active in the Republican Party, which he judged more amenable to his views. When, in the run-up to the 1952 […]

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Mitt Romney, Master of Self-Justification

Born in Detroit in 1947, Romney was the beloved youngest child and family “caboose,” spending more time with his father than his much-older siblings. He spent time with George at the offices of American Motors, where his father served as CEO, and had a front-row seat to the elder Romney’s political ascent. Despite his parents’ […]

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Alexander Payne’s School for Sad Sacks

Paul Hunham (Giamatti, again) certainly has elements of those characters. When we meet him, he is grading papers with his signature harshness, muttering about the “lazy,” “vulgar” “philistines” in his class. Hunham is the longtime, much despised Ancient Civilization teacher at Barton, where he was once a student. The school proves a daunting, frigid character […]

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Alexander Payne’s School for Sad Sacks

Paul Hunham (Giamatti, again) certainly has elements of those characters. When we meet him, he is grading papers with his signature harshness, muttering about the “lazy,” “vulgar” “philistines” in his class. Hunham is the longtime, much despised Ancient Civilization teacher at Barton, where he was once a student. The school proves a daunting, frigid character […]

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Can a New Generation of Luddites Take Down A.I.?

A blend of pacy narrative history and contemporary reportage, Blood in the Machine sees a fresh relevance in the struggles of these misunderstood rebels. The weavers’ combat against “machinery hurtful to commonality” was, in Merchant’s view, the earliest resistance to the destructive tactics of “big tech.” “Move fast, break things” operators like Musk, Thiel, and […]

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Priscilla Confronts a Creepy Elvis

In Priscilla, Coppola leaves off-screen those tribulations of the Elvis myth—the death of his doting mother, Gladys; greedy exploitation at the hands of prescription-happy physicians and Colonel Tom Parker—that tend to excuse him as a victim, a truth that Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me” is careful not to deny. Priscilla’s Elvis is an insecure jock, […]

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Annie Ernaux’s Complex Passions

Should we be troubled by their relationship, with its age gap and power imbalances? Ernaux, a supporter of the #MeToo movement, addresses the question directly. “Our relationship could have been considered from the perspective of mutual gain,” she writes. “He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again. […]

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Yascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man

How, when, and even whether these ideas escaped their academic homes is the real quandary. Most of Mounk’s thinkers penned their famous essays and monographs decades ago. Foucault published Discipline and Punish in 1975, and Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989. Why did their ideas only make it into the mainstream—according to Mounk—many years […]

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West Virginia University Is Everything That’s Wrong With Higher Education Today

Similarly, the 10 programs being cut at Vermont State University include applied business, computer engineering technology, climate change science, and school psychology. Cuts at Marymount University include mathematics, economics, and secondary education, among others. At the University of Maine, Farmington—the University of Maine system’s public liberal arts college—philosophy and religion, history, world languages, and women’s […]

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“Killers of the Flower Moon” Is a Groundbreaking Achievement

There’s no vanity in De Niro’s or DiCaprio’s performance; they are loathsome, petty, and thoroughly unworthy of the people whose trust they are betraying. Scorsese extensively researched and consulted with the Osage to ensure an accurate and three-dimensional portrayal of their society. Those efforts are on full display, but some (including the film’s Osage translator) […]

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“Navajo Police: Class 57” Takes a Long Look at an Impossible Job

It’s hard to escape the thought that the police are part of the cycle of violence. At the close of its second episode, Class 57 splices together footage of recruits being hazed and learning hand-to-hand combat with an introduction in what to expect on the job from victims of domestic violence (to begin the seminar, […]

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